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.