Safeguarding and Child Protection in ICT

ICT in the Modern Classroom

The modern classroom has ICT and a digital approach to learning at its core. Technology has become an essential part of education, with solutions that provide educational experiences that prepare students for the future. However, the risk of providing an engaging digital environment is that students can be exposed to malicious threats or harmful content online.

With an all-important duty of care to their students, the responsibility falls to schools, academies and learning institutions to provide protection. Children and young people are society's most vulnerable people, so the advantages of ICT solutions must be balanced with robust safeguarding measures.

What are the Risks?

Educational institutions are vulnerable to the risks of malware and data theft that all organisations must think about. However, online safety in schools involves several specific risks that must be addressed:

Exposure to sexually explicit, violent, racist and extremist content
Inappropriate contact from individuals who may wish to exploit, abuse or bully children
Students engaging in harmful online behaviour themselves

Responsibilities for Education Providers

UK legislation regarding safeguarding in educational settings has increased in recent years. The need for schools to take up safeguarding processes and controls is significant for compliance purposes. There can be negative consequences for failing to comply.

We understand that budgets are limited and pressure is high in the education sector, so may seem like just another addition to an insurmountable list of daily responsibilities.

Stone Group Can Help

With our assistance, you can empower your staff to improve digital learning experiences. We provide safeguarding solutions that ensure compliance and keep your users safe.

Straightforward tracking, management, monitoring and control of your IT infrastructure. This covers every platform and device, whilst simultaneously protecting your students.
We will identify the most appropriate solution for your circumstances and budget.
We offer comprehensive training, support and guidance right through the implementation of new solutions and beyond.
By partnering with top providers, we supply industry-leading software from names like Senso, Netsupport and Smoothwall.
We can boost your security, strengthen your data protection and shield your users from dangers and malicious access.

What Safeguarding Solutions do we Offer?

Our digital safeguarding solutions involve filtering and monitoring to keep your students' learning experiences safe.

Filtering

First and foremost, we give you control over who is able to access your network. This means managing and controlling all traffic, both inbound and outbound.

We also provide user-friendly solutions for controlling what is and is not accessible on your network. Inappropriate content can be removed from the equation with real-time, automated blocking and filtering. You can manage the blocklists and get detailed reporting across all devices.

We will also implement protection for your users against malware attacks and create a filtering hierarchy so that different devices and departments have different filtering levels.

Monitoring

Our solutions enable you to effectively monitor the activity of your users to ensure their safety at all times. Activity and the risk level associated with it can be analysed within context. You will have remote access to tracking insights like student activity, licenses, IT assets and power consumption.

Safeguarding notifications and alerts will be automatically sent whenever risks emerge. You will have access to intuitive online portals where you can review the activity and performance of individual profiles.

Finally, we can implement advanced AI and even independent teams of moderators to analyse profiles, content and more.

Get in Touch with Stone Group

Stone Group take safeguarding very seriously and if you would like to learn more about how we can help, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Our friendly, experienced team can provide further information on your solutions and answer any questions you may have.

If you have any concerns about your existing systems and processes for digital safeguarding, don't leave anything to chance. You could find yourself facing damaging legal action or, worse still, the children under your care may be harmed.