Allowing students to connect their own smartphones, tablets and laptops to the school wireless network is becoming commonplace across secondary and tertiary education. For those schools with boarders, we know you will also want to provide recreational internet access out of school hours.
So, with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) becoming increasingly common in the independent school sector, how can you ensure the digital safety of the young people in your care?
Alongside the great work you do in school around online safety, the KCSIE 2018 guidelines also mention how filtering and digital monitoring are a key aspect. This is where Vital York can help.
An online safety solution perfectly tailored for you:
Additional benefits
Teachers can focus on teaching, safe in the knowledge that staff and student safeguarding is happening seamlessly in the background.
For the schools we work with, it is imperative that we help them to strike the right balance between web filtering and proactive monitoring.
What is web filtering?Filtering will always be essential for protecting students from harm. But if children are restricted from exploring an environment seemed normal outside of school hours, they won’t necessarily learn the vital skills of how to approach the internet safely. Instead, they are more likely to try and circumvent the filtering and find unprotected access to the internet.
A robust filter will categorise content in real-time without dependence on unreliable and outdated blocklists and will prevent over-blocking and unreasonable restrictions. This is essential for protecting students from harm while still providing the freedom to learn without limits.
We will work with you to find a solution which empowers teaching and learning and gives your students the appropriate level of online freedom.
In a nutshell, our web filtering solution helps prevent students from seeing inappropriate, harmful or dangerous content. Classroom management tools are also installed to help minimise exposure to distractions in the digital classroom, giving teachers full control to keep students focused and on-task.
Our web filtering solution means that all devices, those which belong to school and those which belong to the students, will be ‘made safe’.
The combination of transparent filtering and BYOD authentication means that there is minimal configuration required on each device to speak to the filter – all network traffic that passes across the web filtering software is automatically filtered, and after installation of an HTTPS filtering certificate on each device, filtering is automatically enabled.
Our monitoring tools help provide vital insight if a student’s online behaviour suggest they may be at risk or vulnerable in an area of their lives. They can also help identify the causative factors behind unsafe online searches identified by the web filter.
Through early detection and intervention solutions, we can help schools to spot risks they may not otherwise see and help prevent vulnerable students from slipping under the radar.
Proactive digital monitoring will enable the school to detect online risks or incidents as they happen in real-time. By proactively monitoring both keystrokes and screen views, it will alert the school’s safeguarding team should it detect a student showing signs of risk for issues including cyberbullying, online abuse and hate, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, criminal and sexual exploitation, extremist views, violence, or inappropriate use of school resources.
Our intelligent proactive monitoring solution will only record any concerning online activity, not all activity, so as to protect student privacy.
Early detection and intervention solutions work hand-in-hand with prevention and enablement tools to provide a meaningful and responsive digital safety and wellbeing provision.
Connectivity, filtering and monitoring are provided as bespoke solutions according to your individual needs. Off-the-shelf packages don’t cut the mustard so please contact us to discuss your unique requirements.
Vital York has been our trusted IT partner for a long time, and ten years with my oversight. In that time, they have shown high levels of knowledge and skill in terms of the particular needs schools have and the options for achieving best practice. They
proactively offer guidance for short and long term solutions, enabling the school to both tackle the move to cloud based technology and changes to safeguarding guidance, and also to be future proofed in terms of physical infrastructure. I wholeheartedly recommend Vital York.
Find out more
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help to keep your students safe online, please give us a call or drop us a line – we’re always happy to help.
T: 0344 873 6100
Alternatively, just fill out this short form and we will get back to you!
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Use our list of practical tips to help teens have a safer online experience and build up their resilience to get the best out of the digital world as they grow.
UPCOMING WEBINAR!
📆 Tuesday 20th May
Exploring science with the micro:bit - in this free webinar we will explore using the micro:bit as a tool for science investigations 👩🔬.
🔗Register for free: https://microbit.org/teach/events/
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🌟 Unlocking the Future with Google Workspace Plus & Gemini
🗓️ Tues 10 June, 9.15am-12pm
📍 Ebor Business & Training Centre
This session is for headteachers, principals, school IT leads and colleagues who work in central services for MATs.
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