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E-Safety

Dr Tanya Byron recently produced a document entitled “Byron Review – Children and New Technology”. In her report, she detailed many recommendations to government on how best to tackle internet safety amongst young people. A key area was around education. Teaching young people how to stay safe rather than attempting to shield them from danger provided them with the necessary skills to ensure their own safety.

In her summary she provides the following quote

“Kids don’t need protection we need guidance. If you protect us you are making us weaker we don’t go through all the trial and error necessary to learn what we need to survive on our own…don’t fight our battles for us just give us assistance when we need it.” (Children’s Call for Evidence)

Increasingly, schools are seen as the place where they should learn these skills as, more often as not, parents do not have sufficient internet awareness of computer knowledge.

Gatehouse Partnership Ltd is able to deliver tailored Internet Safety messages to the main stakeholders, the young people, teachers and parents, using different formats and materials to suit the age groups.

The material covers key areas identified by Dr Byron. Keeping Information private, Contact with Strangers and Cyberbullying

We can offer the following sessions

Young People

Assemblies

Timed to fit in with the school schedule, assemblies are normally focused one of the key areas. Typically, this will involve the showing of CEOP or Childnet approved videos. The videos shown will be relevant to the age group of the audience. There will then follow a short discussion and question/answer session on the main talking points. This can then lead into a PHSE session in their individual classes to discuss the topic in more detail.

PHSE lessons

A lesson would ideally follow on from an assembly. If it has not followed an assembly the relevant video would be shown. We would pick out the main talking points from the video and go deeper into the topic with more scope for questions and discussion.

In advance we would work with the PHSE coordinator to link in with existing lesson plans.

Teachers

Unless they are directly involved with Internet safety or ICT, many teachers are just as unaware of the risks that children, as well as themselves, can face.

The aim of this education is to bring them up to speed with the safety issues to empower them to have meaningful discussions with their pupils.

This can be achieved via the use of inset days when many, if not all, the staff are present, or in smaller groups.
We can offer a range of tailored sessions lasting 1 hour, 2 hours or half a day. Depending on the time allocated we can cover the broad topic or focus on particular areas such as private information or cyberbullying.

Teachers can also be particularly vulnerable due to their public position so we advise them about what measures they can take to keep safe themselves.

We are qualified CEOP ambassadors and as such, can also train teachers to deliver material themselves.

Parents/Carers

In school, most pupils have access to the internet and their ability to communicate is well managed supervised. However, this supervision and control is not there when they use their home machines or mobile devices.

Many parents are increasingly worried about what their children are up to and due to an ignorance of the subject they have a fear of talking about it as they would not be in control of the discussion and can be easily bamboozled by the arguments of their children.

We are able to facilitate a parents evening which typically lasts 2 hours.

The aim of the talk is to cover what their children do, what the dangers are, where they can go for help and how to have a more informed discussion with their children.

The presentation is a mix of slides, videos and discussion.

Below are some News Articles from GateHouse Partnership which might be of interest:

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