Promoting E-Safety at Westacre

We are proud to be a school that has high standards and expectations of online safety. We support children in a range of ways to be safe online citizens, including:

• Pupil e-safety web page
• All pupils sign the e-safety charter
• All pupils and staff agree to network monitoring systems on each login
• Any concerns on the network, appropriate staff get alerted
• Parental contact
• Safeguarding tracking system
• Computing ambassadors
• E-Safety assemblies
• E-Safety curriculum embedded across all years

Unfortunately, we are being made aware of an increasing number of issues regarding some of our pupils having their own social media accounts. The following are current legal age restrictions on these sites. Please help us to spread this information. Helpful parent guides about many of these social media platforms can be found if you scroll further down on this page.

Parents can open the following document for a useful parent guide about strategies to combat online bullying:

Below is a copy of the slides from the 2023 parent e-safety workshop:

Helpful Resources

Computing in the 21st Century is seen as an essential area of learning. At Westacre Middle School we recognise that technology plays an important role in the everyday lives of children, young people and adults. Consequently, we endeavour to build in the use of new technologies in order to equip young people with the skills they will need to access life-long learning and employment. We are delighted to provide children with the opportunity to use a wide range of resources to deliver our curriculum. Inevitably however, the online world develops and changes at great speed. New opportunities, challenges and risks are appearing all the time. It is difficult to stay up to date with the latest devices, platforms, apps, trends and related threats. We understand the responsibility and importance of focusing on the underpinning knowledge and behaviours that can help pupils to navigate the online world safely and confidently regardless of the device, platform or app. Many parents and carers wish to continue this education at home.  To support you in this, we have collated a few important websites to refer to.

The National Online Safety group have published the following useful guide on ways we can all work towards stopping online hate together:

This can also be viewed below as a pdf document:

Parents can find the most up to date guides from National Online Safety on a range social media apps and platforms below. They include information about each app and useful tips to help keep children safe.

Parent e-safety workshop

Thankyou to all the parents who attended this week’s e-safety workshop.  Looking at a range of websites and advice alongside the children, the parents worked together to create a list of Top Tips we shall be sharing with everyone.

Some of the positive feedback we received:

”It was useful to be able to look at info relating to social media, apps, etc”

”It’s good to do with your child so they believe you! Often when you tell them no to having an on-line account, they don’t understand the reason why”

”It was wonderful to see how involved the children at Westacre are in developing their knowledge and skills in/around e-safety”

Computing Showcase

It was brilliant to see so many parents in school after the end of the normal day to join in with our latest Computing Showcase. They spent 45 minutes sharing in what their children have been learning in their Computing lessons, which included work in J2E, Scratch and Beebem as well as looking at the Think U Know website.

Digital Parenting Magazine

Check out the latest edition of the Vodafone Digital Parenting magazine, which is full of useful articles about online safety.

How do I set up parental controls?

 Some parents have asked about ways of setting up parental controls on devices that use the internet at home. Here are some recommendations:

Social Networking Guides

Please have a look at these very useful checklists, which give parents many answers to the questions they may have about the main social networking sites.