# Transcript

Online safety messages should be put on throughout the curriculum even if you are doing maths, English and science, just as a reminder that if you are working on IT that there are still risks around that.

Young people should be helped to understand the need of online safety to be open and honest and discuss the risk and discuss their concerns as well. Adults should also I think show a positive role model when using the internet within their setting and teach them safer ways. So there’s many websites out there to help parents and professionals to keep their children safe online. However, it’s a huge task as everything changes all the time.

The young people also are always one step ahead of us as we and the parents and carers need to be alert of that and just keep checking that the parenting controls remain because the students obviously know how to turn them off. Parents are also unaware of all the online dangers themselves. Often leaving the children unsupervised for long periods of time whilst on the internet on games consoles, particularly this year Fortnite’s been an absolute nightmare where grooming has taken place where young people have been talking to strangers over the line and you know they buy them skins.

I have had many naked pictures sent to me by parents saying oh my goodness please help my children I don’t know what to do. What they don’t actually realise is that by sharing that naked picture with me they’ve just broken the law and actually what they are doing is sharing child pornography.

They don’t report concerns very much. It’s often when the staff do spot checks online and they look at their devices that we find things.

My top ten kind of tips would be it’s all about education and making the parents and carers and the staff aware about the vulnerability of this particular group of young people.

In my group work and in the work that you do with young people we need to look at them building healthy relationships with staff and their carers so they feel that they can come to you with any concerns. It’s also looking at a healthy relationship. A lot of young people I work with don’t really understand what a healthy relationship is. They think it’s acceptable for people to emotionally abuse you or to maybe give you a slap. They think that’s acceptable because that’s what they’ve been brought up in.

Education on grooming and what that looked like, how it happens and how the grooming process works. Sexting and the law, a lot of the time when I do the group work all that comes out of it is the fact that the children don’t understand that they can have sex at sixteen which is physical and yet they can’t look at naked pictures or pornography.

That is one that comes up all the time and to be honest I’m honest with the young people and say I actually don’t know but what I do know is that you are breaking the law and you will get yourself in trouble if you do these things, if you look at pornography or you send naked pictures.

Having a safeguarding policy within your provision is paramount. The government legislation is on keeping children safe in schools and education. This is the main kind of legislation that everyone needs to be working for in order to keep people safe, and staff and carers need to report their concerns to the DSL and we will immediately react if we need to.

Monitoring is paramount in the houses that we work for, they do spot checks on the children’s devices and also have an internet safety contract where they give us their passwords and things like that.

There’s helplines out there. The Child Exploitation Online Protection Service which is out there known as CEOPS. Within that there is a Thinkuknow website which does all training for staff, professionals and it also gives online safety tips for children.

The young people do really listen and they take it onboard and they say the right things and they know how to keep themselves safe but you can guarantee that within two to three weeks I’m looking at more safeguarding reports where they’ve been sending naked pictures or they’ve been looking at inappropriate content.

I believe this specific group of young people because they are so vulnerable because of their experiences and their need and their lack of awareness, it makes them particularly vulnerable in this area.