Online safety: governors' role
Understand your role in keeping pupils safe online. Ask the right questions when monitoring your school's internet policies and practices.
Your responsibilities
1. Monitor your school's online safety programme
Make sure:
- Your school is teaching children how to stay safe online (and that this teaching is adapted for vulnerable children, victims of abuse and pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, where necessary)
- All staff undergo safeguarding and child protection training which includes online safety
- Online safety is a running and interrelated theme while your school leaders devise and implement a whole school approach to safeguarding and related policies/procedures
- This means considering how your school leaders reflect online safety in:
- Policies
- The curriculum
- Teacher training
- The designated safeguarding leads's (DSL's) responsibilities, and
- Parental engagement
This is set out in paragraphs 123, 128 and 136 of statutory safeguarding guidance Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) 2022.
KCSIE refers to schools having a 'whole school approach' to online safety, and this non-statutory guidance also recommends this. It means your school should consider all aspects of school life, such as your ethos, environment and partnerships with parents.
Also in 'Safeguarding'
- Childcare disqualification requirements
- Governors' role in monitoring the single central record Updated
- Governors' role in preventing child-on-child abuse Updated
- Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE): September 2022 changes
- Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE): summary
- Monitoring safeguarding provision: checklist Updated