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Online Safety for Children

Keeping Children Safe

Even very young children are accessing digital media both at home and in the early years settings. Children might use, for example, iPhones, tablets, laptops and game consoles - technology has transformed how we live and how we spend our leisure time. As early years providers we need to work with parents to ensure the children in our care are – and know how to stay – safe online.

Advantages: experts tend to agree that the advantages of allowing children supervised and time-limited access to the internet outweigh the disadvantages, as long as risks are recognised and well managed. Technology that might be used with children in the early years setting includes:

• Paint program to draw pictures on the laptop
• Playing matching and sorting games on early years websites
• Reading a touchscreen story together
• Accessing Wikipedia for Schools or National Geographic for Kids to look up information
• Using maths apps together.

Risks: the main risks to children include:

• Physical injury – for example, eye strain and finger / thumb damage, neck and shoulder pain
• Seeing things they should not see – for example, coming across age inappropriate pictures
• Being bullied online – in chatrooms or during online games
• Obesity – lack of exercise due to sitting down too long on digital devices
• Being approached by paedophiles – again in chatrooms and during games
• Exposure to radicalisation and extremism online

Protecting children: young children must be protected online - by closely supervising their online use, teaching them how to hold and use devices safely and enabling parental controls to further keep them safe. Time spent online and using technology should be limited to ensure children access the full curriculum during their day.

Legislation: the Prevent duty which aims to protect children from radicalisation and extremism. If providers or parents have concerns about a child being radicalised or exposed to extremism, they must contact the Prevent duty helpline / their Local Safeguarding Partners and ask advice.

There are links in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) to online safety websites.

It is a requirement of the Ofsted Early Years Inspection handbook that early years providers both keep children safe online and share information about online safety with parents. This requirement is linked to.

Sharing information with parents: it is important that parents we remind parents that they must know what children are doing online. Information about online safety must be shared parents – Ofsted will sometimes ask about this when they speak to parents during inspection.

• Dangerous websites, social networking groups and chat rooms should be off-limits to children and software should be installed on internet enabled devices used by children to stop access to inappropriate sites.
• Set clear boundaries – time limiting online use and setting up passwords and parental controls to ensure children cannot access inappropriate sites. Give children their own desktop with a child-friendly browser (for example, Kiddle) and only allow access to apps, games, online TV etc that you have checked first (for example, K9 software). 
• Home rules - parents are advised to share their home technology rules with any relatives who might look after their child – it is important for children that messages they receive are consistent.
• Public Wi-Fi - when using public WI-FI these might not have parental controls – it is important to be aware of this if children are allowed online eg using an adults’ tablet or phone while on holiday.

Educating children: experts advise that the best prevention to radicalisation and inappropriate use of technology generally is education – talk to the children about how they can stay safe online and make sure they know they can tell an adult if anything worrying happens when they are playing games on the internet. For example, they need to know how to deal with a pop-up (tell an adult who will remove it – don’t click on it) and they need to know how to avoid chatrooms, even if invited by friends.

Children are naturally curious and will push boundaries. Displayed posters can act as a visual reminder but bear in mind that posters become wallpaper after a while. They also need to be reminded regularly that the rules are in place to keep them safe. 

Conclusion: technology learning is one small part of an early years curriculum which threads through the 7 areas of learning – for example, children might read books and listen to them online, watch short clips from religious festivals, watch some television at rest time etc.

When used in an age-appropriate way, technology will be introduced as part of a broad and balanced curriculum alongside all 7 areas of learning to complement each child’s learning in the early years setting and at home. However, technology must be used safely – providers and parents must work together to protect children from the dangers of online use, including the risk of abuse and radicalisation online.