Online Safety

At Hadley Wood School we take online safety very seriously. We always start the year with an online workshop for every class from Year 1 upwards and then have lots of reminders during the year. We sometimes have online safety evenings for parents and grandparents, led by our good friend Luke Brent Savage, who is an expert in this area.

Our full Online Safety Policy can be found on our Policies page, but in essence, we teach the children that the internet is a wonderful resource, but that it has to be used responsibly. We encourage our parents to use firewalls to protect their home computers. It is important not to scold children who access inappropriate sites, but to support us in teaching the children to ask for help if they ever feel frightened or uncomfortable when they are online. The children need to know that adults are available to support them.

We believe that there is a reason that apps and games have a minimum age. We know that if younger people sign up for these apps and games they often won’t understand the implications of what they are doing and could easily make themselves vulnerable by accident.

The information documents shared on this page were produced by Childnet International.  They are guides for parents and carers on how to help children keep safe while using the internet.

Social networking sites, such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, are very popular with children, even those as young as eight and  nine years old. These sites allow children to be incredibly creative online, keep in touch with their friends and express themselves using a whole range of different media and applications such as video, photos, music and chat.

Chatting over the internet can be done with a group of people in a chatroom or with the person you are playing an online game against. As well as being able to add your comments to a conversation ongoing in a chatroom or an online game between a number of people, it is also usually possible to chat privately to one person in these environments. Chatrooms can be accessed on mobile phones as well as computers and other online devices.