Each of the Houses have a range of student leaders and one of the most important roles is the E-Safety Ambassadors.
It is their job to support initiatives and ideas on E-Safety and to keep the topic high on the priority list.
The following letter has been sent put to parents by the E-Safety Ambassadors from Johnson House and is just one strand of the students and the school’s work on E-Safety:
Dear Parents/Carers,
E-Safety and the Dangers of Social Media
We are writing to you as the E-Safety Ambassadors for Johnson House. We feel that social media and the general platform of the internet are dangerous places for us, as children and young adults, to be spending our time and we want you as parents to be aware of how we feel about this.
The first thing we want to ask you to do as our parents is to check our phones ! Yes, we really mean it ! Sometimes we like to show you how grown up and independent we are, but we do not always make the right choices. If we are on social media, we think it would be good if you followed us and checked our posts. Also, you could help us to check that our privacy settings are appropriate. We know from what we’ve learnt at school that not everyone on the internet is responsible and we want you to help us make sure we can use social media safely.
We also know, from how you talk about the internet, that you might not know enough yourself about social media ! We have done some research and found some websites below to help you learn a little more. A few websites we found really useful were:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/curations/safer-internet-day
https://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-centre/parents-and-carers
Our final plea is to stop us if we’re spending too much time online ! After the recent mobile phone ban in school, we have discovered that it’s actually quite fun to talk to our friends instead of texting them or messaging them online ! It’s not good for us to spend too much of our time online and we want you to remind us to socialise with our friends face to face instead of spending our whole evenings online.
When we discussed the dangers of different online platforms in our E-Safety meeting, Youtube was the most common topic in our group discussion regarding the range of unsuitable, dangerous or upsetting information we have access to. Please check what your child has been looking at on this site as it is not all about music videos !
We hope you will join with us in supporting everyone at The Friary in staying safe online and making sure all young people use the internet safely and responsibly.
Yours sincerely,
The E-Safety Ambassadors of Johnson House
Ian Rose, Deputy Headteacher, said: “The internet is a wonderful feature of modern life but it is vital that it is used with care and responsibility. We would encourage all parents to talk with their children regularly about internet and social media use. With the nights drawing in, many parents will be talking about keeping safe in the dark, but it is equally important to keep safe online as dark places exist both in the real world and the virtual world.”
