UKH

Canvassing for knowledge/opinion on what I should say to our kids primary school.. 

Our lad goes to wraparound care at his school and it seems they are allowed to use ipads as part of this. He's been saying he's using some games sites which I'd consider inappropriate for his age, so we raised this with the headteacher. She spoke to my wife at pickup today and while she's not an expert with IT (she doesn't have to be) what she apparently said is worrying and implies they have no restrictions on access for the kids and rely on teachers monitoring and kids responsibility. This seems insane to me and surely there must be requirements for schools to keep kids safe online by blocking (most of!) The Internet..? I'd imagine white listing would actually be the way forward, but I'm no expert either..

I'm going to raise it but would be good to know the requirements on schools to have people responsible for this stuff and the standards they have to meet with their IT governance.

Thx

No personal experience but the below suggests they are indeed flying in the face of legal requirements if they don’t have filters in place: 

https://saferinternet.org.uk/guide-and-resource/teachers-and-school-staff/a...

At school and on work computers it is all blacklists rather than whitelist. If you only whitelist stuff you seriously reduce the use of the Internet for legitimate purposes.

If you block the most used sites (i.e. First page of results on Google) you will stop most of the inappropriate stuff, if you block everything by default you need to know enough about every topic the school teaches to know what to unblock for legitimate purposes or people will get frustrated and suddenly every kid knows how to circumvent the website blocking. 

I would probably just request that they don't use devices for wrap around care. Maybe the tv could go on for a bit if desperate, but there really is no need for devices. The appropriate adults can entertain children with craft / board games / reading / playing outside. I would question why they think using devices is more suitable.

At my school (sen) many sites are blocked for both staff and pupils, inappropriate sites are flagged up. This only applies to devices belonging to school, you cannot use your own device (except when pupils are not on site or emergencies).

If the school are providing Ipads, they will, or should, have some sort of mobile device management on them.

Basically, they install a cryptographic certificate that allows the school to inspect traffic and block or allow. The technology is pretty mature. They will buy the service, rather than the IT bloke having to maintain lists of good/bad sites.

There will also be reporting so they know that pupil 1234 tried to access <some banned category>.  These will be reported back up the chain to the head or class teacher.

Perhaps the best option would for you to go in and get them to explain their system. Then have a go at accessing some mildly dodgy sites such as reddit or facebook.

Kids will find ways to watch / access stuff that their parents think inappropriate.

Just let them get on with it and be there when they ask questions about it.

I don't doubt you're right. However, it isn't acceptable for schools to fail to put any safeguards or basic protections in place to prevent it. Every business in Britain has managed to blacklist inappropriate sites for over twenty years.

From my experience with schools, I strongly suspect that the school does have filters in place and this is just a misunderstanding. Depending on the arrangement they've got, they may or may not be able/willing to customise the filters to exclude the specific games you object to.

And sometimes the blacklists of keywords get a bit over-zealous! We had one school trying to purchase a Cumana Disc Drive via our website but couldn't as their filters blocked them based on the first three letters of the drive brand! Luckily they could place the order over the phone instead.

My experience of administering a local authorities schools network is well out of date, but we used to have a blacklist rather than a whitelist.

The teachers would send requests for sites that kids had accessed that they felt were inappropriate, and once a week I would sit and surf porn, and kid's homepages (as I said, well out of date) - where they posted pictures of themselves smoking, drinking, taking drugs and brandishing weapons - and blocking them (or not, depending on content).

I always felt lucky to have been before the generation who got let loose on the internet whilst too young to appreciate the consequences.

Nor do I, but for the vast majority of kids it will be harder for them to do it at school than most places, including home. 

Again agreed, every school should have an E-safety policy, pretty sure they would be automatically judged to be inadequate without one. The OP's case  does seem to highlight how in a small primary a headteacher needs to be a master of all trades, as the ability to delegate responsibility is limited. 

No data to back this up, but I'd be surprised if businesses are, on average,  banning more  inappropriate sites than schools. Of the the last dozen or so schools I've been in, only 5 have allowed access to UKC? 

I wasn’t suggesting that businesses are blocking any more or less websites than schools are or should be. I was making the point that the concept of restricting access to inappropriate sites, and the technology to achieve it, has been freely available for many years. I’d have thought that was clear.