Securing the future

An Ofsted plan means VARs selling to schools should consider how to safeguard pupils without restricting internet access, says Paul Evans

Schools inspector Ofsted’s latest e-safety clampdown in the education sector is an opportunity for the channel.

Many leading channel players are retreating into offerings that promote censorship, rather than seizing the opportunity to present innovative offerings that can keep school internet access open, while increasing adult vigilance over pupil activity.

From January 2012, Ofsted plans to assess what schools do to protect students against online bullying and harassment, and how they manage pupil behaviour. It will look at how schools develop pupils’ abilities to assess and manage risk appropriately and keep themselves safe. Schools must monitor and record any issues, and special measures will be put in place on any that are deemed to have unsatisfactory safeguarding procedures.

IT can automate much of the compliance process, as well as alert school staff to issues. Children can be taught about the risks and advised on how to avoid them the moment an issue arises, even without a teacher present.

It is clear that the explosion of social media apps, mobile devices and school PCs means increasing opportunity for harmful content to infiltrate classrooms, or enable bullies to evade detection.

However, filters and blocks are the wrong approach here. At some schools, even basic sites now cannot be accessed without a technician’s help, and visiting sites that can be educationally useful, such as YouTube, is forbidden.

Furthermore, Ofsted itself has warned that cocooning children within the artificial safety of a locked-down school IT system leaves them ill equipped to deal with the online world, not only at home but outside school generally.

Harmless web content is often also blocked by standard web security offerings, while some inappropriate content still gets past these filters.

More tech providers should be developing and selling offerings for the education market that can provide safeguards without excessively restricting student internet use.

E-safety software could be used to scan online and offline activity, red-flagging inappropriate images, emails, search terms, website content and even sentences typed in Word documents.

Such software could identify issues as they arise, such as visits to inappropriate or suspect websites, and use of school PCs for non-education activities, unauthorised memory stick downloads, online contact with strangers or proxy bypassing.

Cloud services could notify teachers or other staff remotely of any potentially risky activity.

Offerings could educate pupils about online risks and teach them how to avoid such perils.

Identifying, recording and reporting incidents could be automated. Products that do this already exist.

This would give pupils the ability to manage online risks independently by educating them about the dangers, while effectively giving teachers a way to watch over each and every pupil’s computer at all times.

The channel should consider this different approach. It would also chime with David Cameron’s recent call for the IT industry to adopt “social responsibility instead of censorship”.

The way forward is to help education customers open up internet access for their pupils, while still policing user activity and helping children develop the risk awareness they need outside the school gates.

Paul Evans is managing director of Redstor