Case Study

Safe And Secure High Speed Internet for Education

What is Computeam Connect?

Ultra fast internet connectivity, pro actively managed for enhanced reliability with a cloud based, AI driven, Industry leading, filtering and safeguarding solution, enhancing student safety on any device in any location, all provided as a managed service by leading education specialists Computeam.

It’s more than filtered Internet.

We Safeguard Users:

The Securly story...

The internet has made education more accessible, more dynamic, and our kids smarter.

Today’s students are digital natives, living a vast proportion of their lives on line. As a safeguarding lead you have a responsibility to ensure that no harm comes to your students whilst they are using school owned devices or using internet connected systems at school. Web filtering products prevent access to inappropriate websites but do nothing to help schools meet their wider safeguarding duties.

Many filters ignore the dangers and cries for help which are found within social media, email, cloud documents and files, don’t see bullying, self harm, or early indicators of suicide potential and aren’t always capable of delivering accurate and time critical data, directly to the DSLs and staff that need it. That’s where Securly comes in.

Of course, parents and schools can block certain sites on their networks. But with an estimated 300-500 new sites launched each minute, they cannot block them all. On-premise filters exist, but they are costly and they suffer, as all hardware does, from built-in obsolescence.

Securly allows schools the ability to do more at a lower cost and with a much smaller network footprint. Securly provides school admins with cloud-based solutions to secure their networks, keep students safer, and easily maintain KCSIE and Prevent compliance.

Securly is the industry’s first pure cloud web filtering solution designed from the ground up for primary and secondary education, and enhanced with Artificial Intelligence and Sentiment Analysis to provide real time actionable insights into safeguarding issues detected on line.

Securly AI analyses student on line activity; what they search for, what they post in social media, what they write in e-mail, what they store in google drive, their posts and comments in google docs. It looks for negative sentiments, for signs of bullying, self harm, anguish, and suicide risk, and sends alerts straight to those who need them, such as the designated safeguarding lead, enabling timely action to be taken.

Keeping kids safe while keeping costs down is a win for everyone involved.

Safeguarding Online: Your Questions Answered

We’ve got filtered access in our school, why do we need a better one?

Yes as a responsible educator you’ve got an internet filter but does it have advanced Safeguarding at the core of its makeup?

For many years web filters have focused on blocking inappropriate websites, however browsing now accounts only for a small fraction of student internet activity, with social media, email, search and cloud document sharing predominant. Securly utilises AI and sentiment analysis to monitor student social media, email, and cloud documents for activity which effects life offline, such as bullying, self harm, and suicide. With real time alerting, plain language logging and delegated administration the system provides timely information to safe guarders and teachers.

Your filter detects student safety issues, but what does it do when it detects something?

We have reports and alerts. Reports can be run to investigate issues and to view history and trends. Alerts on the other hand are instantaneous. When the system detects something serious, such as bullying, self harm, threats of violence or danger of suicide – someone needs to know right now. So we have the concept of delegated admin.

Your IT services team (if you have inhouse skills) or Computeam handle the techie stuff – but safety alerts are sent immediately to appropriate people. Perhaps the designated safeguarding lead, the head of year and the form tutor. This means that each responsible person receives just the alerts that they need to worry about – not all of the alerts. These people then have access to a simple “designed for teachers” reporting system so that they can investigate the context and urgency of any alert.

Will we still need an on premise filter?

Computeam provide a router/firewall as part of the Computeam Connect managed service and Securly does the rest in the cloud , for any user on any device , anywhere!

In my school pupils can take devices home, how does that work?

Any Device, Any Location filtering provided by DNS filtering and Page Scan technology offers age appropriate protection even from zero day web sites. With Google Apps for Education and Active Directory integration, Securly provides a “log-in once” single sign-on environment.We even have a Parent Portal which gives parents a view of their child’s online activity by providing snapshots of search histories and sites visited, delivered via user-friendly dashboards and e-mail reports! When school devices are at home appropriate filtering parameters may be set by parents, enabling them to tighten or relax filtering rules giving control over screen time.

Can you safeguard in areas other than just online/internet activity?

Yes Securly Auditor extends the AI and Sentiment analysis to documents, e-mail and Google Drive. It also enhances PageScan with ScreenScan, which enables advanced nudity detection by using image-analysis AI on screenshots of web pages, facilitating the blocking of individual pictures, pages and previously unseen text free pornographic sites. We use sophisticated Machine Learning algorithms to detect any negative sentiments such as bullying, stalking, or self-harm and notify the parents and relevant school staff about any disturbing behaviour detected.

Social media such as Facebook seems to be problematic to safeguard on, does Securly address that?

Yes Securlys advanced AI extends protection to social media platforms detecting the warning signs of bullying, self harm and even suicide, providing realtime alerts and enabling schools and parents to take appropriate preventative actions. Securly’s sentiment analysis reduces false positives and facilitates greater insight.

How can AI help with filtering?

Most filters simply block known bad web sites and keywords. But the meaning of many words is altered by the context of the sentence they are used in. AI, combined with Sentiment analysis enables our filter to understand positive and negative sentiment.

We are only open 40 weeks a year for around 8 hours a day what happens when we are on holidays or in the evenings?

When your school and safeguarding staff are away, our trained 24 team makes sure no student’s cry for help slips through the cracks. You can take comfort knowing thousands of students are safer today as a result of this effort. Our AI-powered sentiment engine scans Google, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube searches, as well as emails and social media posts to identify signs of self-harm, violence and bullying. Flagged results are sent to our trained 24 analyst team who then analyse the activity in context of the student’s complete digital engagement to determine severity and then alert your staff based on your escalation policy.

What about compliance and legislation such as Prevent?

Securly Complies with UK e-safety and counter terrorism legislation. Meets or exceeds KCSIE and PREVENT guidelines on age appropriate filtering and monitoring. Securly Filter is registered with UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC). Implements Met Police CTIRU. Members of the Internet Watch Foundation.

Does it work on Chrome and Ipads?

Yes - it works on any device. Chromebooks, Windows, iOS, MAC-OS, Android – any device in any location.

“tomorrow is my last day, I can’t take this anymore, say goodbye”

This was detected as risk of suicide.

All of the words are innocent yet the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative.

“We chose Securly because of its unmatched ability and top notch commitment to not only keep our students safe, but also to bring our parents into partnership in monitoring their children’s Internet activity on a 24/7 basis”

Phil Hintz

Technology Director

“We looked at a range of web filters. Nothing came close to Securly. It can filter any device, not just Chromebooks. This was really important to us”.

Gary Spracklen

Head King Barrow School Dorset & Government Edutech Advisor

“Securly’s Flagged Activity has helped us contact school counselors four times to make them aware of alarming posts by teenagers ... The avoidance of a single tragedy with one of our students is worth 1000x the subscription price."

Mark Nelson

Technology Director

Download the full case study

Talk to us to see how Computeam can help your school today.

Get in touch >