Online Safety

What is Online Safety?

Online Safety means:

• Knowing about potential threats when you are online; 

• Knowing what you can and cannot (legally) do when you are online and; 
• Knowing how to protect yourself from some of the risks that are involved in using the internet. 

Online Safety covers 'All fixed and mobile technologies that children and young people may encounter, now and in the future, which allow them access to content and communications that could raise issues or pose risks to their wellbeing and safety'.

There are 4 Cs in online safety:

• Contact - being contacted or contacting others.
• Content - the content seen or made online.
• Conduct - the way in which people behave online.

• Commerce - online gambling, loot boxes, scams and financial risk. 

Online Safety at ICS London

As part of our commitment to Safeguarding and growing the skills, knowledge and understanding of our students, online safety is built into the ICS London Safeguarding curriculum.

Students have lessons in personal development that specifically focus on being safe online. We also make wider connections in other curriculum areas too, including business management when exploring e-commerce.

ICS London will participate in the annual internet safety week in February, where students lead workshops and learn about the dangers and benefits of being online.

A large part of our online safety systems come down to the filtering and monitoring of our internet network.

Filtering and Monitoring at ICS London

All UK Schools are legally bound to monitor and filter online activity on school sites no matter the age of the student.

We use a filtering system provided by Smoothwall. 

Smoothwall's web filtering scans the copy, content and context of every page for unwanted material and has 120 filtering categories which can be used to tailor the web browsing experience to ensure that harmful content is out of reach. 

The main focus of the filtering system are sites containing child sexual abuse, terrorism, illegal content, drugs and alcohol and adult content but are not limited to these. This filtering system does not over block and does not lead to unreasonable restrictions as to what children can be taught with regards to age appropriate content and learning.

Smoothwall also allows us to monitor student browsing as another layer to manage the risk of online harms. 

Instant alerts are generated via email instantly and the safeguarding team will view these to see if further action is needed. High risk alerts are also monitored by external staff at Smoothwall and they will phone the school as soon as something happens that needs immediate action.

At Primary, a further layer is added by all students using the child friendly web search engine Swiggle https://swiggle.org.uk/ which further reduces the risk of seeing age inappropriate content.

Getting Support and Advice

The ICS London safeguarding team is here to help. We have produced guides in a range of languages available on this page. There are also many other ways to get support and advice.

The following organisations can offer further support and information.

If you feel like there is immediate risk to a child or young person dial 999.