Our children are growing up in an increasingly digital world and they need to be taught the skills that will help them to participate fully, being aware of how to make smart choices to minimise the dangers they can face online. Those skills need to be worked into the school curriculum little and often through specific online safety lessons but also embedded into other subjects too.

If you are interested in finding out how school-age children are using the internet, then a great source of information is the annual Media Use and Attitude reports by OFCOM. The 2022 report has just been released. It gives a good picture of what our children are doing on the internet – the content they are accessing and the devices they are using to do it. It can be quite an eye-opener.

For official guidance on what schools should be doing to keep their children safe online, and educate them about the dangers, then the DFE have released two guidance documents. Keeping Children Safe in Education and Teaching Online Safety in Schools. Both of these documents should be used by schools to guide their online safety policy. Ofsted will be looking for evidence this as part of their safeguarding observations.

In terms of the content of any online safety lessons – the computing national curriculum is a bit thin on this. But a good place to start is the Education for a Connected World document from the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS). This is a framework of over 300 “I Can” statements divided up into 8 different strands; Self Image and Identity, Online relationships, Online Reputation, Online Bullying, Managing Online Information, Health, Well-being and Lifestyle, Privacy and Security and Copyright and Ownership.

There are no actual teaching resources here to help teach these statements, but it should be seen as a tool to help teachers get an understanding of the knowledge, understanding and skills that children should be developing at each stage.

To actually teach these different strands, one of the best places to start is the Project Evolve website. Project Evolve takes each of the I Can statements from the Education for a Connected World framework, and has produced a lesson based around each one. Each lesson includes questions the teacher can ask as well as presentation slides and worksheets which can be downloaded.

One thing to be aware of with Project Evolve is the signing up procedure. You need to register to access the resources. It’s free to do so, but it does tie your login to your school. The first person from your school to register becomes the admin for that school account and they will be able to approve any further registrations. If you’re not the school Computing coordinator you might want to check with them to see if they’ve already registered, and if not, as them to sign up first before you do. (There’s a long story here about how I became the admin for the school down the road which I don’t work at.. but I’ll leave that for another day!)

Project Evolve is an excellent resource and I really think that every school needs to take a look at the material on offer here. There’s probably far too much content here – you’ll need to select a few lessons for each year group to fit in with the amount of time you’ve got to teach Online Safety through each year.

In addition to Project Evolve, you should also take a look at the Digital Citizenship resources produced by Common Sense Media. Previously their resources were only aligned with the US standards for K-12, but now they’ve mapped them to the UK’s Education for a Connected World strands.

To help assess your children against these 8 strands, take a look at Safe Skills by LGFL.

You will also find some very useful resources produced by CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency. Their ThinkUKnow resources include some excellent videos and they have resources for very young children as well as 11-18 year olds. There are also guides for parents too. You can access them at ThinkUknow.co.uk.

If your school uses Purple Mash then do remember to take a look there for lots of online safety teaching material and activities. London Grid for Learning also has an excellent portal with lots of teaching resources.

Also check out the resources from the NSPCC and Google’s Be Internet Legends.

If you want more links, I have put together a Wakelet with plenty of links to other online safety guides, which you can find here. I’ll update this as I find more.

And if you want me to talk to your staff about online safety then I am able to run CPD sessions which look at how to teach online safety, the dangers our children face and also how teachers can stay safe online. I can also deliver sessions to parents. More information on my Online Safety CPD sessions can be found here.