SchoolCare’s focus product of the month is Web Filtering for Schools:
The need for e-safety is a paramount concern for Schools in England and Wales who must be able to prove that they are keeping their pupil’s safe from terrorist and extremist material when accessing the internet in school. This is documented in the Prevent Duty Guidance: for England and Wales, 2015. With this guidance being released it has never been more important for schools to provide compliant protection.
The prevent duty guidance requires schools to have appropriate content filtering and monitoring systems in place. However, schools need to be careful not to over block content that could be viewed as unreasonable restrictions, teachers still need to access online teaching and safeguarding resources.
SchoolCare are partnered with Lightspeed Systems which enables us to provide a content filtering solution that will ensure your school is compliant with the prevent duty guidance. The content filtering system has flexible content filtering policies and reporting functionalities. Lightspeed’s content filtering solution is fully compliant with the prevent duty guidance, it can identify individual users, filter mobile devices, advanced reporting and the ability to see historical search data. Lightspeed systems are also members of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and they also work closely with the Home Office to ensure that the web filtering platform is constantly updated with the latest categorisation and monitoring tools.
The system has granular control which means there isn’t a central policy that has to be followed. This enables schools to be in full control of their own filtering requirements, right down to a single individual user. Staff can have permissions to make quick and temporary changes to polices themselves, for example if YouTube is blocked as standard, but a teacher would like to use an appropriate video in their lesson, the filtering system allows for a specific URL to be unblocked and only this specific URL can be viewed on YouTube.
As standard, SchoolCare have a high-level policy enforced so that inappropriate content isn’t accidentally unblocked.
Contact us today to discuss implementing a compliant web filtering solution at your school.
