As messaging services, online gaming and social media have become more embedded in our everyday culture, so too has the importance of safeguarding, protecting and educating our children within the digital realm.

Mobile Devices and Smart Technologies

Feltonfleet School

• We use digital technologies to ensure that we can effectively deliver on our 5 Key Aims.
• Effective and discerning use of technology is clearly outlined in our Five Year Strategic Plan.
• We are a mobile phone free school. 
• We do not recommend provision of a mobile phone to children aged 3-13 years.
• If you choose to provide a mobile phone to your child when they are out for contact purposes, consider a 'stripped back' SMART phone managed with parental restrictions. Prioritise contact apps only and ensure location finding is enabled. Add the what3words app to support your child to give their precise location. 

Access to Internet-enabled devices at home

Feltonfleet School recommends that ...

• Parents establish clear boundaries around the use of Internet-enabled devices in the home.
• Pupils use Internet-enabled devices in populated family areas only.
• Recreational use of devices does not occur Monday to Friday, as many pupils will have already accrued levels of educational screen time during the school day.
• Pupils do not have access to social media (Facebook, Instagram etc) or messaging apps (WhatsApp, Kik, SnapChat etc). These are not suitable for pupils <13 years of age with UK data protection laws clearly stating that children under 13 should not have accounts.
• Pupils do not use YouTube unsupervised. Due to the open source nature of YouTube, we intentionally block access for pupils on school devices in order to effectively safeguard their access around harmful content.
• Pre-Prep and Lower School age pupils do not have unsupervised access to devices.
• Parents consider the PEGI ratings assigned to computer games and utilise parent review sites (such as Common Sense Media) to guide their decision making over gaming options for their children.
• Parents consider the level of screen time accrued by their children recreationally at the weekends and set appropriate boundaries. Screen time should cease a minimum of 60 minutes prior to bedtime. At Feltonfleet School we align ourselves with the approach operated by the Royal College for Paediatric and Child Health, namely the importance of considering recreational screen time in terms of the 'opportunity cost' of using a device versus doing something else, with a view to achieving a healthy balance prioritising social interaction, active play and family engagement.
• Pupils should not have devices in their bedrooms.

Filtering and monitoring

Feltonfleet School recommends that ...

• Parents become familiar with the parental controls offered by their Internet Service Provider. These will vary from company to company. Parental controls can offer management of individual devices as well as filtering of inappropriate content.
• Parents research device-specific parental controls. These can be used to limit the ability to download apps and to set precise screen-time limits.

Modelling the way

Feltonfleet School recommends that ...

• Parents consider their own use of personal devices in the home, modelling discerning and appropriate use by their children.
• Parents initiate discussion around online safety and use of digital devices, facilitating the incremental awareness and digital ‘resilience’ of their children and their discerning use of technologies.

Our Five Key Areas for Digital Parenting

We believe that there are 5 key areas where schools and parents can work together to ensure a consistent approach:

What do they look like in practice?

For more age specific guidance, follow the links to our Pre-Prep & Lower School, and our Middle School & Upper School Digital Parenting Event content, located at the top of this Firefly page. 

Reporting illegal content or contact

The Internet Watch Foundation

The Internet Watch Foundation works to make the Internet safer by removing illegal content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos. To make a confidential and anonymous report, please use the link shown.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection service