The 2023 changes to Keeping Children Safe in Education have introduced a number of factors affecting IT.
The main changes affecting IT are in paragraph 142 which links to the DfE filtering and monitoring standards and requires schools and colleges to:
- identify and assign roles and responsibilities to manage filtering and monitoring systems.
- review filtering and monitoring provision at least annually.
- block harmful and inappropriate content without unreasonably impacting teaching and learning.
- have effective monitoring strategies in place that meet their safeguarding needs.
Further, governing bodies and proprietors should review the standards and discuss with IT staff and service providers what more needs to be done to support schools in meeting this standard.
Questions for schools to answer:
- Are arrangements in place for governors or proprietors, SLT, DSL and IT service providers to work closely together?
- Does the IT service provider have technical responsibility for:
- maintaining filtering and monitoring systems
- providing filtering and monitoring reports
- completing actions following concerns or checks to systems
- Has the IT service provider worked with the senior leadership team and DSL to:
- procure systems
- identify risk
- carry out reviews
- carry out checks
We provide all this and more to the schools we support. To report a website that should be blocked, click here. To report a website that should be unblocked, click here.
Paragraph 144 is around Cyber Security and states:
Education settings are directly responsible for ensuring they have the appropriate level of security protection procedures in place in order to safeguard their systems, staff and learners and review the effectiveness of these procedures periodically to keep up with evolving cyber-crime technologies.
We offer a number of Cyber Security services to schools to help them comply with this requirement. Click on the links below for more information:
