Keeping Safe Online

It is everyone’s responsibility to safeguard children.

At Merryhills, we embrace how technology has become an essential part of our everyday lives and believe it is an environment that offers a wealth of resources that benefits us all. From using it as a tool to improve teaching and learning, to accessing information from around the world, to talking to friends or it simply helping us with our work, technology is undoubtedly part of our children's today and their future. 

With this in mind, we take the matter of our children becoming responsible digital citizens very seriously; keeping safe online is an important message that we regularly give to our children.

Our Computing Curriculum explicitly incorporates an element of online safety at least termly and we also take part in the national Safer Internet Day in February each year. 

We have taken age-appropriate outcomes from Education for a Connected World- UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCIS), which gives guidance to support children to live knowledgeably, responsibly and safely in a digital world to build our curriculum.This framework focuses on eight strands of online education:

The children will revisit the eight strands each year. Our approach enables us to ensure that our curriculum for our children aligns with Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2022, which states that the breadth of issues classified within online safety is considerable and ever evolving.

As a school, we also teach the children Google's 'Internet Legends Code': 

google beinternetlegends poster.pdf

 One way of keeping safe is by using child friendly search engines such as Swiggle and Kiddle.

Keep Your Children Safe: Enfield's Guide for Parents 

 Useful Links 

Childnet- Keeping Young Children Safe Online

kidsonlineworld - App and Gaming Safety Advice

CEOP - Thinkuknow Parent Section

Merryhills' Online Safety Workshop 2023

Virgin Media Online Safety Test

Online Safety Newsletters 2023/2024