Online Safety

We take Online Safety very seriously and actively teach all of our children how to keep themselves safe online through our computing and PSHE curriculum. 

Below are some useful guides and tools to help you support your child to remain safe whilst working online from home. You can also access all previous editions of our Parent's online safety Newsletters which contain lots of helpful information and advice. 

It is important that primary aged children are supervised on devices and that parents remain in control of passwords and security settings. 

If you have worries or concerns Childline has online advice and tools or can be contacted on 0800 1111.  

Family link

Family link is a free app that allows you to view your child’s activity, manage their screen time and apps and set boundaries. It is available on google play and the app store. You can read more about this app on their website here. Family link will work for a parent on either android or apple but it will only work for a child if their device in android. Family link will also run on chromebook.

YouTube

Lots of you told us that your children like to watch things on YouTube but you are worried it’s not safe. Here are top tips to make using YouTube safer for our children.

For younger children consider downloading the YouTube kids app. This app has a restricted search and allows you to set time limits – so no arguments when it’s time to come off. This guide tells you all you need to know about this option. Someone asked if we can trust YouTube kids app – I think the answer we can’t trust anything 100%. We still need to check, supervise and monitor when younger children are online.

Older children may not be happy with this as it does limit content so some things they want to watch they may not be able to access on the kids app. Another option is to use YouTube in restricted mode. This helpful guide will show you how to set this up and this will block explicit and adult content and will also screen out the comments section of videos they watch.

There is also something called YouTube supervised accounts. This is a great option for young children and the website below contains more information about how it works and how to set it up for your child with some helpful 'How to' videos. 

YouTube Parental Restrictions (esafety-adviser.com)

If your child wants to make YouTube videos it is important you discuss this first and set some ground rules. You will need an account to upload videos – check the privacy settings are secure. When uploading your videos set them as ‘unlisted’. This means they can only be seen by people you choose to share the link with. Be sure they understand that anything we post online leaves a digital footprint and if posted publicly we can never be sure if copies have been made or saved somewhere. Some harmless fun as a child could come back to haunt us as an adult and can even affect us getting jobs etc in the future. Posting publicly always opens us up to nasty comments which can affect our wellbeing. Children’s innocent videos e.g. doing handstands can sometimes make them the target of unwanted attention (e.g. child hasn’t considered the fact that their dress has revealed their underwear or imitating provocative dance moves from music videos)

Parental controls

If you want to check you have all the privacy settings just right to keep your child safe then check out this website. You can select from a range of devices, games consoles, internet providers and social media apps to get a step by step guide for parents on how to check the settings are right for your child.

These short videos offer help in setting up parental controls on different devices/apps.

Roblox

Roblox was another popular game which came up a lot. There are certain elements of risk around the chat function and in-app purchases etc.This helpful guide explains how to ensure your Roblox account it set up safely and securely and to avoid these problems and to ensure children can play safely.

Online Safety Newsletters 

Online Safety Documents