Safeguarding & Online Safety

At St Thomas’, we take the upmost care to try and keep our children safe when using digital technology. To make our provision as safe as is reasonably possible, we engage with technology partners to implement protective measures on our network to make Internet access age appropriate. We take a multi-faceted approach.

Below is a brief overview of the systems that have been put in place:

Firewall

We use this to control what type of communications can come in and out of our network. Whilst we let most traffic flow out of our network, we are protective about what we let in.

On-site Web Filtering

The bulk of our web protection come in the form of an on-site web filter. We use this to block whole categories of websites that complies with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). We can manually allow or disallow particular URLs also and we can differentiate devices for different filtering levels.

Cloud Filter

Any traffic that passes out of our Internet connection goes through a Cloud based DNS web filter. This helps to stop malicious websites from being unknowingly accessed by our users. We also use this to enforce that the search engines we use MUST have safe search functionality to filter out mature content. We also block several top-level domains with this which are more likely to be mature or malicious in content.

Device Monitoring

Whilst we acknowledge that web-filtering is always only ever best effort, we also have an online safety platform (SENSO) that is installed on all our Windows and Chromebook devices that monitors their usage around the clock, from anywhere that Internet is available to the devices. This is works in the form of screen reading looking for ‘violations’ based on several keyword categorisation. Violations are logged immediately and are reviewed daily.