Online Safety

“Listening and acting upon pupil voice is crucial in this area as we want to provide education that is relevant to students today.” – Jessica Goves, Head of Online Safety

This year we formed an Online Safety Team to lead on the strategy of online safety here at Wellington College. The team consists of Jessica Goves (Assistant Deputy Head Safeguarding & Head of Online Safety), Chelsey Cole (Teacher of Computer Science and Online Safety Education lead) and Michelle Brookman (IT Services and Online Safety Technical lead). The team meet fortnightly in order to plan, discuss and review policies, curriculum and current issues within online safety.

The team assess and monitor any serious issues which have breached the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy), for example review reports of frequent VPN users and inappropriate searches online. As a result of this Housemasters/mistresses have been able to have supportive conversations with students in order to raise awareness of appropriate use of technology.

The team have also delivered assembly programmes for Third, Fourth and Fifth Form students raising awareness on issues such as online relationships; online privacy and online reputation.

This term the team has been focused on Safer Internet Day, the theme of which is ‘Want to talk about it? Making space for conversations about life online. In the week of the 6 February students will deliver a College assembly on Safer Internet Day, Houses and tutorials will focus on and facilitate discussions around students experiences of life online and College social media will be used to raise the issues that matter most to our student body.

The month of February will also see Third Form students attend workshops themed around topics they want to learn about most based on feedback the Online Safety Team received last term: staying healthy online and online privacy & security.

In addition to the work the Online Safety Team are carrying out the librarians run a course on Research Skills for all Third Formers to prepare them for the academic demands of their Wellington College journey, for independent research projects, and for life beyond school. This course focuses on the resources of the library and e-Library to ensure the students understand the importance of using reputable, authoritative sources for their research projects.

Lucy Atherton, Head Librarian explains the learning outcomes of the course:

“Our goal is to drive the students to the high quality digital resources that the Library can access rather than simply ‘Google’ their topic. Digital literacy is a crucial skill for young people in the age of information overload. We use a framework to enable students to critically evaluate online sources. Exploring the pitfalls of fake news through discussion and a fake news quiz we also cover newspaper bias, misinformation, opinion pieces, advertorials and reliability of different news sources. The students then evaluate websites in pairs to see if they can discern whether the site is genuine or fake and find evidence to support their view.”

The pupils present their findings to the group and taking a vote on the outcome. The course is run in small groups in the library and is highly interactive. Emphasises is on the importance of not sharing information or news items online unless absolutely certain of their authenticity, and to double check sources to validate them.

For information about Online Safety you can visit the UK safer internet website HERE.