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Online Safety

St Patrick’s Catholic Voluntary Academy

recognised for its commitment to helping pupils stay safe online

St Patrick’s Catholic Voluntary Academy is now a

National Online Safety Certified School

St Patrick’s Catholic Voluntary Academy has successfully completed a comprehensive online safety training programme demonstrating its commitment to keeping children and young people safe online.

The Academy – has received a National Online Safety Certified School Accreditation for its whole school community approach to protecting children in the online world.

National Online Safety is a multi-award winning digital training provider with extensive resources in online safety, developed in line with the Department of Education’s statutory requirements.

Its CPD accredited courses and educational resources support UK schools in educating the whole school community in online safety– including all senior leaders, teachers, all school staff and parents – on how to make the internet a safer place for children.

James Southworth, co-founder of National Online Safety, said: “Congratulations to everyone at St Patrick’s Catholic Voluntary Academy on becoming a National Online Safety Certified School. By completing our training programme, the school has shown its strong commitment to implementing an effective whole school approach to online safety.”

“It can be increasingly difficult for schools and parents to stay ahead of online threats and ensure both children and staff are safeguarded from potentially harmful and inappropriate online material. We arm schools with the knowledge they need to understand online dangers and react in the best way possible to any problems.”

Parents/carers of St Patrick's can register on the National Online Safety website and utilise all the resources available by following the link below:

https://nationalonlinesafety.com/enrol/st-patricks-catholic-voluntary-academy

Online Safety Policy

Online Safety Policy.pdf

Message from The Community Safety Team

South Yorkshire Police

As a Primary school in our force area we would like to take this opportunity to contact you to raise concerns we have around inappropriate internet use by children starting with children as young as four.

With younger children the content these children are sharing tends to be on parents/carers accounts, who are completely unaware that this has happened until their account is locked, or they have a knock on the door from the Police.

Below are the statistics from our Force to illustrate the increase in this type of referral:

Last year 11 % of our referrals were for safeguarding concerns such as self-generated image uploads, sextortion and sexualised chat between a child and an adult. This year we have seen a huge increase in safeguarding referrals with 26% having been received in the first half of this year (Jan - Jun).

We're not entirely sure why there has been such a jump, but we suspect it is mainly due to online companies improving their safeguarding abilities in readiness for the internet safety bill so is likely to continue unless we can give education/ prevention advice to schools, parents and children.

There also appears to be a change in the gender of the children uploading, previously it was predominantly females now there is a pretty even split between the genders overall.

The largest age group for referrals were those aged between 4-7 and 63% of all of the safeguarding referrals were for children who were of primary school age.

Age Range	Males	Females	Total % of referrals for age group
4 to 7	15%	20%	35%
8 to 11	12%	17%	28%
12 to 15	23%	8%	32%
16+	5%	0%	5%
Total % for gender	55%	45%

Please note the information in this email concerns behaviour of children much younger than we speak to and the information contained in this email is for Parents/Carers of all children to be aware of and act on, if required.

This information is not suitable for us to deliver to children of such a young age in school.

Over the years we have tried various ways of trying to speak to parents/carers of school children, none of which have been successful in managing to speak to them in large numbers, hence this email. Please can you share the above information with all the parents/carers/staff within your school.

Please see links below for websites where up to date information can be obtained about internet issues, in-depth details around apps, platforms, etc that children may be using and also guides how to set up accounts safely.

https://nationalonlinesafety.com/

https://www.internetmatters.org/

https://www.internetmatters.org/?gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwrranBhAEEiwAzbhNtZnNCFH88gfhUZTeUklTMiOzijn2mNpKldnpb2vcjamrEq38WrhPKBoCA_QQAvD_BwE

Internet Safety input for year 5 and 6

The Community Safety department do offer an Internet Safety session to Y5 and Y6 children. We will visit your school and deliver a 1-hour input to your pupils.

Please email Schools_Engagement@southyorks.pnn.police.uk if you want to book this input.