Aug 2022 LGFL's Digisafe has fully revised and updated their Online Safety Policy template and all Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs).

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'The Kent e-Safety Strategy group comprises of school staff, Kent County Council Officers, child safeguarding officers, Connexions, Libraries and Archives, Kent Police and other children's workforce professionals. We work to support the work of the Kent e-Safety Officer to develop advice and guidance on online safety for schools, settings and professionals working with children and young people in Kent. We work with the Kent Education Safeguarding Team and the Kent Safeguarding Children Board.'

Read more and access the templates and documents here.

There are many templates available for schools to use and we recommend you consider SWGFL's. All templates need to be tailored to your specific needs and most schools should also check that their policies are in line with their local authority's policies and procedures.

Download the template here

The e-Safety Policy is vitally important in school for a number of reasons, including:

To ensure there is a clear and consistent approach responding to incidents.

To ensure that every person responsible for the children is fully aware of his/her responsibilities.

To set boundaries of use (goalposts) of any school owned IT equipment, or personal IT equipment used in the school.

The following is a short "10 top tips" for creating your e-safety policy in school. There are many more, but these are some of the common ones that schools miss:

Read the full article here

The following are a series of age specific acceptable use agreements and guidelines. They are intended to to establish a suitable moral and ethical approach to the use of technology in its various forms.

The author has combined the three different levels of acceptable use agreements into on summary document that links the three strands of responsibility into a digital citizenship continuum. The three strands are:

Personal responsibility

Social responsibility

Material responsibility

The policies and associated pages are here.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has issued penalties with associated high fines to councils and schools. There are lessons for all organisations who manage and share personal data of children and colleagues on a daily basis.