Online 360° Safe Award

The Friary School holds the top-ranked Grade 1 for the Online 360° Safe Award which reflects our curriculum commitment to ensuring our students are fully equipped to deal with the benefits and risks of the online world.

This external curriculum accreditation ensures that our provision and education is top-notch but also demands that we are reflective and responsive in our practice as we manage and educate about the rapidly changing virtual world.

This curriculum award expects the highest standards in our filtering and monitoring systems which see our students protected online whist they are in school through the nationally respected Smoothwall system. Our filtering system ensures that we block harmful content and manage accessibility so it remains current, robust and well-informed. Elsewhere, our monitoring systems ensure there are external professional checks and immediate alerts to key school staff should any inappropriate contact, searches or language be used online.

Elsewhere, this curriculum award demands high-quality education to students so that they are able to safeguard themselves online when they are outside the protected environment of our school. This involves students learning about the benefits, the risks, the personal responsibilities, and the legal accountabilities of the internet, and sets them up not only for teenage life, but also for the adult and professional worlds we prepare them for. Additionally, we extend this teaching to our students’ families so that they remain up-to-date in their awareness of the online world.

Our students benefit from the educational support through tutor times, assemblies, PHSE sessions, and day-to-day lessons. The online world is exciting and fast-moving and we seek to ensure we provide that energy in our teaching because grabbing teenage attention regarding the online world, which they are so intimate with, needs to be sharp, snappy and succinct.

We are hugely proud of this Grade 1 curriculum provision and it is an integral part of our safeguarding provision. Our students’ safety matters to us all of the time – in school, in the community and when they are online – and this is why protection to secure and learn about online safety is such a high-profile part of our school curriculum.

To learn more about our Online 360° Safe Award and to access support on online safety, contact Steve Neale, Deputy Safeguarding Lead, via office@friaryschool.co.uk.