E-safety at St Teresa's

Safer Internet Day

On Tuesday 8th February 2022, we joined schools and youth organisations across the UK in celebrating Safer Internet Day 2022. Safer Internet Day is a global campaign to promote the safe and responsible use of technology, which calls on young people, parents, carers, teachers, social workers, law enforcement, companies, policymakers and more, to join together in helping to create a better internet.

Using the internet safely and positively is a key message that we promote in our school, and celebrating Safer Internet Day is a great opportunity for us to re-emphasise the online safety messages we deliver throughout the year. The children were involved in activities about the opportunities and challenges involved in being on-line. We would be delighted if you could join us in celebrating the day by continuing the conversation at home. To help you with this, you may be interested in downloading the free Safer Internet Day  resources for parents and carers that is available at: saferinternet.org.uk/sid-parents. There are top tips, quizzes, and films, which you can use at home with your child.    Some other resources which you may find helpful in supporting your child online are:

• Tips, advice and guides for parents and carers from the UK Safer Internet Centre
• Advice for parents and carers from Childnet (com/parents-and-carers)
• Reviews and information about games, apps, TV shows and websites from Common Sense Media
• Help on using parental controls and privacy settings from Internet Matters
• Information and reporting of online grooming or sexual abuse from CEOP (police.uk)

Online safety is an important issue which as a school we are committed to teaching our  children about.

We take the safety of our children very seriously at St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School, and this includes ensuring that they are safe when using ICT. 

We are able to monitor our computer network to see what our users are doing.  A clever piece of software runs silently on our computers and monitors what people are doing.  It sends reports to a database that we can then view - and then we can intervene if we think any of our users are not using our computer system appropriately. 

This software runs alongside our curriculum lessons where we teach our children about internet safety.  We understand that at school, our filtering systems and monitoring software work hard to protect our children - but we also understand the importance of educating them about how to react to the 'dangers' of the internet  when they are away from our controlled network (at home, at a friends etc) and what they can do if they feel at risk.  

As technology and the internet are almost constantly evolving, we will do our best to ensure that children at St Teresa’s are always aware of how they themselves can do the most possible to protect themselves when using the internet.

To help you keep your children safe at home, take a look at the useful links below.