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Last week I attended a very thought-provoking e-safety conference organised by WMNet. All four speakers reinforced the same messages, which I have summarised here:

• Most importantly - this is not just an ICT issue - technology is part of the children’s everyday culture and we ignore it at our peril.
• Schools have a duty of care inside schools and should not ignore children’s wellbeing outside school.
• Education is the key – we need to help children take control and manage their e-safety themselves.
• We need to understand this new culture and we need to consult with the children in order that anything we do is relevant to them and owned by them.
• A strategic approach is required, for example, each school needs an e-safety officer and e-safety policy. All policies which relate to the ‘real world’ should also relate to the virtual, digital 21^st century world.
• Related government legislation – Every Child Matters (Stay Safe), ‘Safeguarding Children in Education’ September 2004, also ‘Harnessing the Technology.
• ICT is very powerful and extremely useful, and we shouldn’t concentrate only on the negatives – however;
• Risks are:
  Content- accessing adult material, violence, racist/hate, illegal drugs, software piracy (all areas filtered out by BECTa accredited ISPs at school).
• Also material that children upload themselves through sites such as Bebo, MySpace etc where personal info can easily become public, or where children can upload inappropriate material themselves (and once there, it is very difficult to get rid of!)
• Commerce – phishing, fake e-mails, contacts that are easy to get into but difficult to get out of etc.
• Communication – e-mail, instant messaging, chatrooms, virtual worlds (some moderated, some not), digital images, webcams in children’s bedrooms etc. Much of the time, you don’t really know who you are speaking to or sharing your information with.
• And this can lead to :
  Contact – e.g. with unsuitable adults. CEOP (Child Protection and Online Protection) set up as a single point of contact to combat this, though education initiatives such as ThinkUknow, the ‘virtual global taskforce’ which enables children to report abuse virtually and training and awareness raising campaigns.
• Culture - e.g. cyber bullying (posting unpleasant things, removing peers from contact lists etc).

Conference presentations can be found at http://www.wmnet.org.uk/ under Resources and Activities.