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The importance of meeting the standard

Schools and colleges should provide a safe environment to learn and work, including when online. Filtering and monitoring are both important parts of safeguarding pupils and staff from potentially harmful and inappropriate online material.

Clear roles, responsibilities and strategies are vital for delivering and maintaining effective filtering and monitoring systems. It's important that the right people are working together and using their professional expertise to make informed decisions.

How to meet the standard

Governing bodies and proprietors have overall strategic responsibility for filtering and monitoring and need assurance that the standards are being met.

To do this, they should identify and assign:

a member of the senior leadership team and a governor, to be responsible for ensuring these standards are met

the roles and responsibilities of staff and third parties, for example, external service providers

We are aware that there may not be full-time staff for each of these roles and responsibility may lie as part of a wider role within the school, college, or trust. However, it must be clear who is responsible and it must be possible to make prompt changes to your provision.

Technical requirements to meet the standard

The senior leadership team are responsible for:

procuring filtering and monitoring systems

documenting decisions on what is blocked or allowed and why

reviewing the effectiveness of your provision

overseeing reports

They are also responsible for making sure that all staff:

understand their role

are appropriately trained

follow policies, processes and procedures

act on reports and concerns

Senior leaders should work closely with governors or proprietors, the designated safeguarding lead ( DSL) and IT service providers in all aspects of filtering and monitoring. Your IT service provider may be a staff technician or an external service provider.

Day to day management of filtering and monitoring systems requires the specialist knowledge of both safeguarding and IT staff to be effective. The DSL should work closely together with IT service providers to meet the needs of your setting. You may need to ask filtering or monitoring providers for system specific training and support.

The DSL should take lead responsibility for safeguarding and online safety, which could include overseeing and acting on:

The IT service provider should have technical responsibility for:

The IT service provider should work with the senior leadership team and DSL to:

procure systems

identify risk

carry out reviews

carry out checks

When to meet the standard

You should already be meeting this standard.

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Meeting digital and technology standards in schools and colleges

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Find out what standards your school or college should meet on filtering and monitoring.

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From KCSIE 2023, the DSL is asked to take lead responsibility for web filtering and consider the DfE standards. This page is to support your journey towards this - whether you are a beginner or have worked for years with your technical teams to better understand and effectively manage filtering - which is all about keeping children safe.

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LGfL Appropriate Filtering Document provided to the UK Safer Internet Centre

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LGfL Appropriate Filtering Document provided to the UK Safer Internet Centre

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SWGfL questions for governors and trustees

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According to Keeping Children Safe in Education, "Schools and colleges should consider carrying out an annual review of their approach to online safety, supported by an annual risk assessment that considers and reflects the risks their children face." This document is designed to help schools complete such an assessment.

It is vital that an online safety audit is neither treated as a tickbox exercise, nor viewed as a static report: it should be a living document that reflects the fluid realities of technological change, evolving harms and user behaviours. This means for example, the latest national, local and school trends and incidents that will be reflected in your training and policies (see the LGfL template OS policy for national trends we have identified over the past year).

Since the KCSIE 2023 changes specifying that the safeguarding lead has "lead responsibility for [...] understanding the filtering and monitoring" and which refer to the new DfE standards, including the need to "review filtering and monitoring provision at least annually", you may wish to use the filtering and monitoring sections of this audit to perform this review - we recommend it be carried out in the context of all other areas of online safety to ensure that filtering and monitoring support the curriculum, whole-school approaches, safeguarding team interventions and vice versa.

An online safety audit should be carried out by or with the safeguarding team, in recognition that "the designated safeguarding lead should take lead responsibility for safeguarding and child protection ( including online safety and understanding the filtering and monitoring systems and processes in place)" (Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023, emphases added). Even though curriculum responsibilities may lie elsewhere, a whole-school approach requires collaboration and a common understanding, so it is important that all sections are not carried out separately and then combined.

We recommend that results, conclusions and actions are incorporated into a school's overall safeguarding audit (also known as the Section 175 audit) and considered as part of a holistic, contextual safeguarding approach - not treated separately to offline issues.

This audit has been broken down into two broad sections:

We suggest you use the final column to add the evidence, links, details and when it was checked, plus risks and actions/mitigations (by way of documenting your risk assessment).

Feel free to edit this template and add your school logo but please do not remove the LGfL branding or copyright notice and rather than share the file, if you would like to share with other schools, ask them to visit onlinesafetyaudit.lgfl.net

Remember to share results with your school governors or trustees (as well as the safeguarding governor, the new need for a filtering and monitoring governor and broader standards give new relevance to them all seeing this document) to help them fulfil their oversight duties. We welcome feedback to help us improve the tool, via safeguarding@lgfl.net

* Safe School Systems has more detail than in other sections to help non-technical colleagues better understand technical issues. The length does not reflect relative importance to education and messaging.

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According to Keeping Children Safe in Education, "Schools and colleges should consider carrying out an annual review of their approach to online safety, supported by an annual risk assessment that considers and reflects the risks their children face." LGfL has created a document to help you complete such an assessment.

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The Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020. The GDPR has been retained in UK law as the UK GDPR, and will continue to be read alongside the Data Protection Act 2018, with technical amendments to ensure it can function in UK law. If you transfer or receive data from overseas please visit our End of Transition and International Transfers pages. You should make sure you can identify any data you collected before the end of 2020 about people outside the UK, for further information, see our Q&A on Legacy Data.

On 01 January, there will not be any significant change to the UK data protection regime, or to the criteria that compel DPIAs. This guidance draws on European resources which we still consider to be relevant, and so these resources remain part of our DPIA guidance.

We will keep this guidance under review and update it as and when any aspect of your obligations or our approach changes. Please continue to monitor our website for updates.

This guidance discusses Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) in detail. Read it if you have detailed questions not answered in the Guide, or if you need a deeper understanding to help you understand or complete a DPIA in practice. DPOs and those with specific data protection responsibilities in larger organisations are likely to find it useful.

The guidance has been revised to adopt the European Data Protection Board's 22/2018 opinion on the ICO's list of processing operations subject to the requirement of conducting a DPIA.

If you haven't yet read DPIAs in brief in the Guide to GDPR, you should read that first. It sets out the key points you need to know, along with practical checklists to help you comply.

Contents

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Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs)

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DPIAs are a tool to help you identify and minimise the data protection risks of new projects. They are part of your accountability obligations under the GDPR, and an integral part of the 'data protection by default and by design' approach.

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Check from different devices

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Designed and Developed by Will Earp & Matt Rosser, South West Grid for Learning (https://swgfl.org.uk/)

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Test your Internet Filtering to see whether it blocks Child Abuse and Terrorist content, as well as access to pornography.

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Online Safety Audit | LGFL