Online safety

Online risk can be classified in three ways:

• Conduct risk: children participating in an interactive situation. This includes bullying, sexting, harassing, being aggressive or stalking; or promoting harmful behaviour such as self-harm, suicide, pro-anorexia, bulimia, illegal drug use or imitating dangerous behaviour. A child’s own conduct online can also make them vulnerable, for example, by over-sharing their personal information or by harassing or bullying others.
• Contact risk: children being victims of interactive situations. This includes being bullied, harassed or stalked; meeting strangers; threats to privacy; identity and reputation (for example, through embarrassing photos shared without permission, a home location being identified, someone impersonating a user, users sharing information with strangers); and violence, threats and abuse directly aimed at individual users and/or groups of users.
• Content risk: children receiving mass-distributed content. This may expose them to age-inappropriate material such as pornography, extreme violence or content involving hate speech and radicalisation.

Some online risks cannot only lead to harm, but also result in illegal activity such as:

• sexual grooming and sexual exploitation,
• creation and distribution of child abuse images,
• online aspects of child trafficking,
• online radicalisation,
• physical and mental abuse of children,
• selling and distributing illegal drugs,
• revenge pornography, harassment and malicious communications.

St Brelade’s College holds the view that it’s critically important to give users, especially children, the space and opportunities where they can develop their e-safety knowledge. Our aim is to encourage students and their parents to reap the benefits of the digital age along with keeping themselves safe online.

Parent & child

• Children and their parents will have access to age appropriate general e-safety awareness online videos: Parents will be advised to watch with their children e-safety videos in advance of their language course.
• Children and their parents will be educated on digital space areas such as privacy and risky behaviour: Parents will be made aware of the parental guidance on platforms we use for our online teaching, along with links to sites providing online safety advice.
• Children and their parents will be educated about how to recognise and report things which concern them: Details of who and how to report any concerns to the school will be provided to students and their parents.
• Teachers will encourage e-safety awareness for children: Lessons will integrate e-safety into lesson content and include advice on the risks posed, how to keep themselves safe online and what they should do if they are exposed to online abuse or are concerned about the potential of being abused online.

St Brelade’s College staff

• Staff will complete relevant training, ensuring they understand online risk. Regular in-house training will be provided.
• Staff will know how and when to report concerns.
• Staff will follow the school safeguarding policy and the additional online teaching safeguarding policy in order to follow best practice guidance and protect children from online abuse.

Teachers will follow the guidelines set out in the school safeguarding policy on how to deal with classroom bullying. Any students found to be bullying another student will be removed from the lesson immediately and appropriate welfare measures will also be taken.

Anti online bullying resources: Guidance and activities to generate classroom awareness of the impact of bullying.

We want to ensure that St Brelade’s College online lessons are a safe environment where students can learn and practise English, so we have rules for online lessons which students must follow.

• Rules are sent to parents at the beginning of a new course, requesting that parents discuss these rules with their child.
• Any student who shows disrespect or lack of tolerance for peers or teachers will be asked to leave the lesson. Teachers will report any bad behaviour to the Director of Studies who will then decide how to move forward with the issue.

Rules for online lessons (under 18 years)

Personal details

Students must:

• use their real name (birth first name and surname),
• not share their email address, phone number, home address, school name, messenger ID or passwords with anyone,
• not invite anyone to meet them or offer to meet anyone in real life.

Lessons

• Web cameras must always be turned on. If not, students will be asked to leave the lesson until the problem is resolved. Microsoft Teams backgrounds should not be changed during a class.
• Private chat will be turned off.
• There will be a waiting room system where the teacher will invite the student in.
• The lesson will be locked once everyone attending is in.
• Students will not be able to share their screen with others.
• The teacher will always be present in the lesson.
• Students should have their lesson in a communal room in their house, not their bedroom. The teacher will always be teaching from an appropriate location and we welcome an introduction to parents.
• Students must always be fully dress for lessons (not bed clothes).
• Mobile phones are not allowed during lessons without permission from the teacher.
• No eating during lessons (a drink is allowed).
• The teacher should be informed if students need to leave the class to go to the toilet.

Respect other students and staff

• Students are expected to be polite and respectful to all other students and teachers.
• If students make rude or inappropriate comments, they will be asked to leave the lesson, and a meeting will be arranged with the parent(s) to discuss the behaviour.

Speak English in the class

• Students should remember that they are in the class to learn English so should always communicate with other students and staff in English.

If students feel uncomfortable with anything, they should tell a teacher or the school.

Safeguarding our young students is of paramount importance to us, whether the course is online or face to face. We ask parent and child to read the following information before signing up to an online junior course:

• Rules for online lessons (above) – ensure the child understands everything before starting the course. This not only outlines what basic steps we take to keep our students safe online, but also explains the ‘rules’ by which we expect all students to follow.
• Online safety advice on this page (above) – this explains in greater details what steps we take to ensure the safety of our younger students online.
• British Council guidelines on staying safe online guidelines.
• NSPCC general parental advice about online safety.

Delivering online lessons to under 18’s

• Keeping professional boundaries – lessons will stick to lesson content and not drip into personal information about teacher family or home.
• Teachers will use school accounts for lessons and not personal accounts and contact with students will be made through the school system.
• Lessons will be scheduled by the school and not by the teachers and will usually take place during school hours where possible.
• Teachers will deliver lessons and students will attend lessons from appropriate rooms (preferably family rooms) and not bedrooms.
• Where possible, a neutral background will be used for your lesson or a school logo in the background.
• Teachers and staff will dress appropriately for lessons, as they would for face to face lessons.
• Lessons will be monitored from time to time by a member of staff in order to supervise lessons and know professional measures are in place. This will be carried out by popping into classes and being transparent about why they are doing this. Records of such monitoring will be kept by managers on the school shared drive.
• 1:1 lessons will continue to take place with extra safeguarding measures in place. These will include teachers choosing a suitably monitored room to deliver the lesson from and asking parents to pop into the room from time to time to check in with their child.
• Lessons will usually NOT be recorded by teachers or students. However if there is a need to record lessons, students and parents will be informed in advance and written consent will be given – in this case students and parents will be informed of how the recording will be stored, for how long and who has access to the recording.
• Lesson records – these will be kept up to date as usual and monitored by DOS in case any concerns have been missed. Any concerns will then be reported to a DSL as usual.

Use of technology

• Teachers will always be present in rooms when students are present and at the end of the lesson, the teacher will be the last person to leave the room.
• A waiting room system will be in place whereby the teacher will invite the student in.
• A new meeting room will be used for each new lesson.
• The room will be locked once all students are present.
• Screen share will be switched off/only the teacher will be able to share screen.
• All students should be seen at all times (web camera should be be turned on). If a student has no video, then they will be removed from the lesson until the problem is resolved.
• Everyone in the lesson should use their real name at all times. Lessons will be kept real. ‘Posing as someone else’ will be disabled.
• Private chat options will be disabled prior to the lesson starting in order for all chats to be monitored and prevent for example bullying or other safeguarding issues.
• Teachers will be check that the screen they’re using behind the session is clear and there is no personal information shown along with the tool bar etc.
• Where possible, teachers will use equipment provided by the school. If this is not possible, teachers will be provided with a risk assessment and guidance from the school manager/Director of Studies on how to use their own equipment within a safeguarding framework