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Tuesday 18 October 2016
Members present: Lord Best (The Chairman); Baroness Benjamin; Earl of Caithness; Lord Gilbert of Panteg; Baroness Kidron; Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall; Baroness Quin; Lord Sheikh; Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury.
Evidence Session No. 4 Heard in Public Questions 52 - 60
Mary McHale and Karl Hopwood.
Q52 The Chairman: Thank you both very much for coming before the Committee. We are two minutes ahead of time. I am going to ask you, if you would, to tell us a little bit about yourselves. We have your CVs. For the record, and because we are televised—I am not sure how many people watch us—it would be very helpful if you just said a little about your background, where you come from and the particular way in which you are approaching our inquiry on children and the internet. Mary, would you like to go first?
Mary McHale: Thank you. I am Mary McHale. I am the lead tutor of key stage 5 and the e-safety leader at St Peter’s Catholic School in Solihull. I have been an integral part of embedding e-safety into our school community. Now, because of the success of e-safety in our school, we are also working with local schools in the community. I have worked towards accreditations, which include ThinkUKnow, the NSPCC’s “Keeping Kids Safe Online” and the Ofsted-recommended EPICT accreditation. As part of that now, I have become a facilitator so I can accredit other schools in the locality with EPICT facilitation. We have also been working with the University of Oxford in producing some resources that can go across the UK, and I am delighted to have been invited here today to discuss this matter.
Karl Hopwood: Good afternoon, everybody. I am Karl Hopwood. My background is in education. I was a primary school headteacher for a number of years, but for the last nine, almost 10, I have been working probably 60% of my time in schools with pupils, parents and staff around online safety issues. The other part of my work is for INSAFE, which is the organisation that co-ordinates the Safer Internet Centres around Europe. My role there is primarily working with helplines that just deal with online safety issues. I am very pleased to be here.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Lord Sherbourne.
Q53 Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: Can I direct a question, first, to Mary McHale about the work that you have been doing in schools on online safety? So that we are clear, what do you think are the most important aspects of what you are asking schools to do and where is it most successful?
Mary McHale: When I started looking at the e-safety in our school community, the success of what we have done is the cohesion that we have had between the staff, the students and the parents. We have worked cohesively together to ensure that all of us are safeguarding our students because it is an integral part of the safeguarding now in all schools.
We set up an e-safety committee in the first instance. Five members of staff—teachers, IT managers and the headteacher—were involved in that. We also have lots of students involved, so they can communicate with any concerns that are on the ground in the school. We teach the students about their roles and responsibilities in becoming a safe digital citizen. When they come to us with a concern or they recognise that something is going on, we can work together to ensure that we reduce any problems with that.
For many years now we have run a very successful e-safety parents’ evening. In fact, we have one on Thursday. This time we have opened our doors to the primary schools in the local areas because some of them are having a little difficulty in trying to attract parents to their e-safety evenings. Because ours is quite successful, we have opened it up to many of them. We have always had a very good turnout, but we hope that this year it will be even more successful. We have an e-safety log in school that we promote to schools, which records any e-safety concerns that go on in our school. We have a look at a solution and we revisit that, because sometimes when we deal with a concern, it might come to a good outcome but it might crop up again four weeks down the line. We can talk about a social media concern where somebody has posted something inappropriate about another student. We would deal with that but we would revisit it. The students know that we are always looking at what goes on and we are revisiting it all the time. We feel that it has been successful.
I am ever so proud of the students in our school because they are really responsible digital citizens. They tell us anything that is going on and we are all trained as staff to recognise any of the associated risks. All the staff have regular training. We have just embraced e-safety in our school. There is a safer internet day in February, when our day becomes a week of events. We make sure that it is embedded throughout the school from year 7 all the way up to year 13. We get all our staff, governors and parents involved in that so that we are taking a cohesive approach.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: As a result of what you call this integrated approach, can you give the Committee one or two practical examples of how the children—the students—have behaved, reacted or done things in a different way, which is obviously a positive outcome of all this work?
Mary McHale: One student recently was online and somebody was trying to get her to send them pictures. She kept asking questions. Our advice to the students is, “If you do not know them, you do not make any connections with them at all. You ignore them or you block them”. But all students are inquisitive and so she did pose a couple of questions. She recognised that, even though this person was saying, “I know who you are. I am a friend through a friend”, she was able to recognise the risks associated with that. She then told her mum; her mum phoned the school. We could speak to the student about it and she was able to block this person.
When they came and told me this story, we did not have to intervene in any part of that but just make sure that she was happy, safe and there were no emotional aspects of that going on. It was a really proud moment to see that all the work we have been doing in school is having an effect on these students and they are becoming really responsible and recognising the risks, quite clearly. Therefore, that is reducing any further problems down the line.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: So that I am clear, when you say that that work has produced this outcome, what was the school doing so that the girl responded in this way?
Mary McHale: We have been thoroughly educating our students throughout and assuring them that what goes online stays online. It is a meaning that we have throughout the school. Also, it is to ensure that we teach them, as part of our aspects of training them, that, if they do not know this person online and they are being asked to make contact with them, they do not make connections at all and they connect only with people whom they know so that they become safe.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: Mr Hopwood, what do you think are the most successful ways of engaging or undertaking e-safety with children and school students?
Karl Hopwood: In the past, perhaps we have not been using the best messages for online safety in terms of young people. To give you an example, we used to say to children, “Do not talk to strangers online”. I completely understand why we used to say that to them, but I am not sure that that message is quite fit for purpose. It is very blunt. If I am in a class of year 5 and year 6 children—so 9 to 11 year-olds—frequently, at least 50% of them will be talking to strangers online every day, normally through the online games that they play.
In the work that I am doing in schools, I say to young people, “If you are having conversations with people you do not know, there are certain warning signs and certain things that might happen that mean you need to go and ask for some help”. If the messages are too blunt, and if people are using resources that have been around for an awfully long time that have not been updated, I worry slightly that, perhaps, young people disengage.
The other thing we used to say to people is, “Do not give out any personal information online”. We all know that you cannot do anything online without giving out some personal information, so we have to be a bit more nuanced in what we say.
Baroness Quin: I want to follow up on something Mary said. It made it sound as if the teachers are very savvy about what they are doing. Is there a big time commitment given in the school to help teachers themselves to master the awareness and the messages that they want to give to children? Say a new teacher is hired; do they immediately have some kind of induction course into this particular activity?
Mary McHale: They do. We are very good at making sure that our teachers are up to date with what is going on. Through our e-safety committee, we ensure that we are dealing with the apps, the internet sites or the games that are being played in our community. What we train on in our community is not necessarily what would be going on in another community near us—one size does not fit all. Every community has its own problems or issues. You will find that there will be apps or internet sites that are appropriate and will go across all the schools in the UK. However, what we might have been dealing with last term will not be what a school down the road might have been dealing with. We make sure that all the teachers are trained in what is going on.
For example, another thing we do, if we are concerned that something has gone viral quite quickly, is to send out an e-safety alert to our parents on that day to make them aware of it. We will also put some training on for our staff to recognise any signs or to forward any names or anything that they are concerned about. It takes a lot of time. However, digital technology is constantly evolving and it is part of our responsibility to keep up to date with what is going on, because it is an integral part of safeguarding. Therefore, if we are to look after these children, we need to make sure we know what they are accessing online, because, if we do not, we are potentially opening them up to some dangers. We are not saying that everything that comes online has negative effects. However, we need to be very savvy about what is happening and we need to work with the parents to look after these students.
The Chairman: Lord Gilbert, did you want to come in?
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: Thank you. Let me just ask you a little more about working with parents. Your school is, clearly, at the leading edge of protecting children online. You emphasise, however, the importance of an integrated approach and working with parents. How do you reach out to parents who are not participating and who are not coming to your evenings, particularly where you might assess that a child is at risk or at greater risk than other children? Do you have any other way of reaching out to them?
Mary McHale: We do. We send out bespoke emails to them. Last year a group of students were concerned about something, as were we. We invited only those parents to come along. We had a very informal meeting. We do not make it formal. It is just about us working together to ensure that we protect them online. I would not say it is all parents. It is very difficult. However, we have ways of sending out emails if they do not attend, or we can have other meetings at a more convenient time. That is what we have done in the past and it has worked well. I think the parents are really appreciative of the effort that we go to, to make sure that they are up to date with what is going on in the school community. At the end of the day, it is their children we are looking after. We all want to make sure that they are safe while they are in school and outside school.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: Do you have any sense of the proportion of parents who are not participating?
Mary McHale: It is difficult to put it as a percentage. When we had a meeting, when some of the parents did not turn up, if it was a few, then we would send an email, we would ask for a meeting, and then, by the time we had taken several approaches, we had pretty much ensured that we had engaged all our parents.
The Chairman: Lord Sheikh, did you want to ask a question?
Lord Sheikh: The point I was going to raise has been asked by Lord Gilbert. I wanted to find out about participation by the parents and whether you get full co-operation from the parents. You have adequately covered that.
The Chairman: Let us go to Baroness Kidron.
Baroness Kidron: I know that both of you are experts in e-safety, but I wanted to broaden it out, because one of the things that we have become quite interested in is the concept of the well-being of children and that not everything that might affect their well-being is necessarily a risk or a harm in itself. I wondered whether both of you, in turn, would talk about some of the other challenges, whether around concentration, critical thinking or anything you can think of, that you see as an issue for young people that might not be expressly a risk or a harm as we think about it.
Karl Hopwood: It is a really important point. When I am in schools and able to have conversations with young people as opposed to standing in front of them and talking at them, I suppose, the number of young people who talk about the pressure that they feel when they are online is really striking. They talk about how much time they spend using their devices. Some of them are using apps now to manage how much time they spend online, which sounds counterintuitive. That is potentially quite helpful. They talk about the effects that they think blue light has, using Apple’s night shift mode and so on to limit that.
What worries me the most is what mainly, but not exclusively, girls, say about the pressure that they feel to look a certain way and to behave in a certain way when they go online. We are also starting to see that backed up in the research. The Children’s Society produced something at the end of the summer holidays that said that 34% of 10 to 15 year-old girls are unhappy with their appearance, and a lot of that was put down to pressure by social media. That is something that is quietly causing real concerns.
My worry is that they often do not have anybody to talk to about that. Not wanting to go away from the question, you mentioned parents before. Many of the children tell me that they will not tell their parents if something is happening because their parents will overreact, take the device away and then there is a problem. I worry about that.
Mary McHale: I totally agree. There is the ideology now of the selfie, and there are even tips on taking the perfect selfie. When students look at their profile, it is full of selfies of them looking much older than they are. There is a concern with that, too. When they are talking to other people, other people think that these students are much older than they are.
Another aspect is online gaming. We have some students in the local community who play for hours on end every night on these games getting to certain levels, and then when they come into school the next day they are so tired, their heads are down and it affects the teaching and learning. We have to look after the students’ emotional and social well-being. For boys, a growing concern is how long they spend on these gaming, whether games they have bought or an online game that they are playing against other people.
Baroness Kidron: I am very interested to know whether you think you have a successful strategy for that in your school, because I know that children being tired out from the night before is a problem in schools.
Mary McHale: Yes. A bit of kinaesthetic learning always helps them in the morning, to be honest with you. A bit of jumping around seems to waken them up, but there is not really a good solution. We just need to work with the parents to make sure that there is an appropriate time or there is a limit when they are off these games. I have to say that it is down to parental responsibility to ensure that they are off games at certain times or that it is not affecting them. As teachers, we would alert any concerns to the parents if they were very tired. As I said, we have the training for the risks associated with that, which we would highlight to parents or to the e-safety committee and speak to the students about that.
Baroness Kidron: That is interesting because that leads to my next question, which is that we often hear in this Committee, “Oh, the schools have to do this; the parents have to do that”. We are quite interested to hear from both of you whether you think there is an edge to the school’s responsibility. What is it that you think schools can reasonably be asked to do and what responsibilities lie elsewhere, possibly beyond parents, such as government, companies, technology—I do not know—but I would love to hear from you?
Karl Hopwood: Anybody who works with a young person has a responsibility to deal with some aspect of online safety. The school probably does have the edge because most—but not all—children will go to school. Some of the things that the Government have done, particularly Keeping Children Safe in Education, which came out last month, are now saying that we must ensure that online safety is being taught. That is a fundamental shift from where we were when schools were just told that they should consider teaching it.
One thing we should do is to get parents to realise that they have some responsibility around that. I agree with Mary about devices. For example, there are many times that I talk to young people who tell me that they sleep with devices in their bedroom and are disturbed by them, and then when you talk to the parents, they say, “Oh, yes, my 10 year-old does sleep with her phone because she uses it as an alarm clock”. You think, “Buy one that you wind up and you cannot play games on it”. Sometimes they look at this online safety “stuff” and they see what is in the press, and it is very extreme. Please do not get me wrong. It has happened and it has affected those children, but sometimes it is so extreme that parents think, “That is not really something I need to worry about. That happens to other people”. One thing we need to do in schools is get them to realise that it is about them.
Mary has mentioned this already, but every school is different. The children are using different apps, games and so on. A brave school will carry out an anonymous survey of their pupils and then say to the parents, “We have X% of our pupils who are doing X, Y and Z. We think there is a bit of a risk with that. Come in and we can talk about it”. But it is a brave school that does that because the parents may then blame the school and suggest that somewhere else would be better.
Mary McHale: I agree with what Karl has said. We have the document Keeping Children Safe in Education, and Working Together to Safeguard Children, which is an integral part of what we are doing in school. The onus comes down to schools, although I agree, as I said, that it is a cohesive approach that everybody needs to take. Students need to be part of that approach, too. They need to recognise the associated risks, but it is our responsibility as educators to teach them.
It is not going to be a culture that changes overnight. It has to be a drip-drip effect. So from the first e-safety parents’ evening that we did—we did not have many, but now we have a lot more, to be honest. That is why we have opened it up to primary schools. It is something that we all have to take part in. It is not just a responsibility for the schools or for the parents. Most of the activity that we deal with in school, and other schools do this, is not what goes on in school but what goes on in the home, and then is brought into school the next day for the teachers to deal with. Then we should also get the parents involved with it. That can be a problem. We all need to take part to ensure that we are all working together for an approach to this.
Baroness Kidron: Finally, I am going to make an assumption that the internet has been remarkable as a methodology of teaching and delivering. Could you say something—you have already mentioned tiredness—about critical thinking, because that is something we do not hear very much about? Do you think that the way young people engage with the internet or digital technology is good or bad for their critical thinking? Do you have a view on that or is that outside your remit?
Karl Hopwood: It should be something that forms part of their personal online safety education. In schools where it is done well, they use that as a teaching opportunity to talk about the content that they find online and to get them to consider what is valid, biased and so on. I worry a little that those are not often the skills that are being taught. Too often the focus is on risk and harm and perhaps not looking at some of those much more important skills, which they will be using for the rest of their lives, to be quite honest, when they are using this sort of communication. There are many opportunities to do that, but my worry is that a lot of colleagues in schools—not every school, clearly—do not feel that they can deal with this, because young people are talking about things that they are not familiar with or comfortable with; but that critical thinking comes back to basic pedagogy, in my view.
Mary McHale: I agree. There are concerns about critical thinking regarding use of the internet and then how much they critically think it through. It is, again, just a bit of a drip-drip effect; that we make sure we are allowing the students to become good critical thinkers and we give them the tools that they need to ensure that they are doing this successfully.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: I am going back to this issue about the behaviour that children will get involved in, such as gaming, the overuse of certain apps and all the rest of it. I am very intrigued by this e-safety committee idea and about the kind of collaborative approach that you have taken to this. When you get parents and, indeed, teachers, involved in those discussions, do you ask them about their behaviour? Do you ask them whether they are playing games in the middle of the night or are constantly worried about their children? It seems to me that one thing is about the way behaviour is modelled to children, not just about telling them what they must or must not do. How much of that do you build into the way you think about talking to the whole community and not just your students?
Mary McHale: The staff also have their training. They are role models to the students, not just in our community but in all communities. They have to make sure that they are a role model in their behaviour. Within our community I would not have issues about that, but we do remind staff about their responsibilities of being online. Policies are in place. We have just looked at our social media policy and our rights and roles as a teacher using social media. The e-safety committee is successful because it does not put the onus on one person to embed e-safety throughout the school. It involves a lot of people working together to make sure that we are taking a whole-school approach to this situation.
Our staff are role models. There may be some staff who play the games that the students are playing, but the difference is, probably, that they are of a legal age, maybe, and some of the other students who are underage should not be playing these games. I have spoken to many schools where some primary school students are playing games that are for those aged 18 and above, and that seems to be okay. Our e-safety means that we would deal with any issues in that. The staff, from my experience, are very responsible and they are role models to the other students.
The Chairman: In passing, I would like to ask about children and their mobile phones at school. When you are in a classroom, do those little alerts go off? Is this the cut-off point so that at last silence reigns in the classroom?
Mary McHale: In our school, we have a “no mobile phone” policy, so if the teachers see them we confiscate them. We put them into the office until the end of the day; so we do not have any mobile phones in school at all. That also goes for our sixth-formers; we do not allow them to have them. There is only one communal area where they have phones, because we have given them more responsibility, but if I see them somewhere else I confiscate them. The only digital technology that they have is that owned by the school and, therefore, no teaching or learning is being affected. We have safeguarded everybody.
That does not go on in all schools. There are some schools that issue mobile phones as a teaching resource to their pupils. It just depends, but it does not go on in our community. I have to say that I agree with it. It just takes that onus away and then we cannot see the mobile phones. Any technology that we have is owned by the school and we have made sure that everything is okay.
Karl Hopwood: That situation varies massively. The privilege of my job is that, because I am in a different school every day, you see some schools, as Mary said, where you would not have phones out, but I have also seen it being used effectively, where students can take a photograph of some homework that they need to do and so on. Often, the example set by staff is appalling, to be quite honest. I go into an awful lot of schools and I see staff sitting in sessions that I am delivering with a phone in their hand. I will wander round, and it is Facebook and things like that. Recently, the deputy head said to me, “Can I ask? Did you see any staff with phones?” I said, “Yes, I saw loads of staff with phones”, and he said, “Our policy says that they should not have phones out when young people are around”. Clearly the policy does not work.
We have talked about the whole-school approach. I think a lot of this stuff needs real, serious discussion. In one school I was at recently, last year they decided to allow students to have phones while they were eating their meal, which I thought was not good. This year they have pulled back from that because they said it really changed the whole atmosphere in the school dining room. It is really great that they were strong enough to say, “We tried this. We got it wrong. It is not for us”. Real clarity is important and, again, Keeping Children Safe in Education asks for real clarity around a mobile policy for staff and pupils, which is helpful.
The Chairman: Excellent. Lord Gilbert.
Q54 Lord Gilbert of Panteg: I want to ask about the technology used in schools to monitor students. We heard last week from someone who represented a company that provides a service that monitors and reports what students are doing on their school networks. Mr Hopwood, what is your general view of such technology, do you use it in your school and is it part of the programme that you have described?
Secondly, it was not clear to us how and whether consent was obtained from children and parents, and what rights children in different age ranges had when they were monitored intrusively by this technology. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Karl Hopwood: There is a place for monitoring. Any young person who is thinking about this will not use the school-filtered monitoring system to get access to what they want to get access to. Having said that, there is a place for it. I have seen it used very effectively where, perhaps, they have identified that a child has been searching for potentially difficult and challenging content around pro-anorexia, suicide and things like that. Provided that they are logging into the system as individuals, because that is not always what happens, that can be particularly useful.
In terms of the consent, one of the things I always say to parents is that, if we are going to monitor what somebody is accessing, we need to be transparent with them that we are doing that, otherwise it will damage their relationship, they will question the trust and, then, young people are less likely to talk about any problems that they face. There is a place for it, and I know that the guidance now is telling schools that they need to do it. My worry is that some of them I have spoken to this term have spent a lot of money putting in a very expensive system, but I am not sure that it is will provide them with any useful information that will make a difference to young people.
Mary McHale: Ofsted recommends that they have filtering systems in place, and we have that in our school community. I am all for the monitoring of the students. From one example we had—the pro-ana and pro-anorexia sites—some students might be in school and they might be trying to search for this online. Our system will then pick that up and we will be able to intervene straightaway before any issue goes along the line. So we can get parents involved and we can ensure that we look after their social and emotional well-being. We have had a number of alerts that have alerted us to something in the first instance, before it develops into a problem, so that we are being proactive to the situation rather than reactive when a problem evolves.
The parents are aware that we monitor the students and we get them to sign a policy. In their student journals, there is a policy. They sign the policy and so do the students, and that is revisited at the beginning of every academic year. Whether they have been there for one year or for seven, they revisit that, too. Staff are also asked to tick an okay box for the first time that they log on at the beginning of the year because staff systems are also monitored. It is like a whole-school plan that we take part in.
In my opinion, it is incredibly beneficial. I have not come across a situation where I have been alerted to something and had to deal with it where it has been a waste of my time. I have felt that it has been very good and it has alerted us to any issues that are going on. Sometimes, students who know they are being monitored and are struggling with something might start typing something in, so it is a way of them alerting us to them without them having to come to us first. That has also been beneficial too.
We also have an online bullying form about any issues going on in our school community. They do not have to speak to a member of staff. They can just fill in the form online. Then it gets posted to their lead tutor. That includes anything to do with any e-safety concerns inside or outside school.
The filtering system has been running in our school now for a number of years, and I have not had any negative aspects from it. I have always found it to be quite beneficial.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: Could you give us any sense as to how many reports you would receive most weeks and actions you would take?
Mary McHale: It depends on your level of filtering system. Ours is quite high. We can ensure that key stage 3 would be quite high with the filtering and the alert, and we would tone it down for some of the content for key stage 5. That would be because of their curriculum. They might be looking at content that might alert or cause some concern, but there is not a concern there; it is just to do with part of their curriculum.
The one that comes up most comes under the category of porn. However, it is because we have a high monitoring and filtering system, so if you type in certain words it comes under that category. Obviously, it also helps us with our Prevent duties with radicalisation and is incredibly important in safeguarding our students. At the moment, because of the words and the words termed with it, “porn” would be the highest, and followed by that there would be “bullying incidents”; but, if you filter that down, you will find that a lot of the ones that come under the porn filtering system are because they have been searching for something on homework that would come under that category. It could be something to do with biology or some word that would just fall into that category there. That is why.
At the beginning of the academic year all the students are very busy; they are back in after the summer holidays and they are ready to work. Then, as the year goes on, we tend to have a little more concern over alerts, but we deal with them. In some weeks you could have something, and then some weeks you might not have anything at all.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg: For the sake of clarity, both parents and students proactively consent at the beginning of each year.
Mary McHale: Yes, they do. They sign the policy in the first week and then our tutors check that they have signed that. Also, when we have the e-safety evenings, we put out what we do to ensure that everybody is aware of what monitoring goes on in school.
Baroness Kidron: I am struck by the range of issues that you have to deal with, and at the same time this is all after the event. I am just interested in whether either of you has a feeling that there should be more responsible design in the first place and whether there is something that you would like to say on that.
Karl Hopwood: Definitely, yes. Very often, in my experience in schools, young people are struggling with something that could have been prevented. For example, if social networking sites set their privacy to “Private by default”, it would not be hard. Let me give you a quick example. I was in a school earlier this week and two children who were nine years old were using ooVoo, which is a kind of Facetime for up to 12 people. Interestingly, when I spoke to their parents that night, they suggested that they used ooVoo instead of Instagram because they thought that was safer, for some reason, but because they used ooVoo and it was public, some very unpleasant people had been joining their chat and sending them inappropriate things. The parents said, “Shall we stop them using these things?” I said that it is more about the privacy. But if we could get that done at source, it would make things so much easier.
Mary McHale: We also had the same problem in our school community just last year. I know that neighbouring schools also had problems with that particular app. We tell the students that their geolocations go on every time they have an update on the Apple phone devices, which a lot of students tend to have these days, and that it turns the geotagging or the geolocations back on. Therefore, every time a student takes a picture and posts it, you can actually find out the location of that. We have to keep saying to the students, “You must turn it off all the time”. We say that to our parents too.
This is something for the producers of the apps. By default, it should be set to “private”. Some of the apps that we have dealt with at school have been very good and worked with the school to ensure that we are taking a responsible approach, but for others you could be waiting for months. Part of the problem when dealing with that situation is that you may alert them to something going on and they are not quick to respond to it, although it is having quite a detrimental effect on students, not just within our locality but I am sure across the whole of the UK. Privacy settings are an important factor of e-safety. With these open forums that are open to the public, you need to make sure that everything is set to “private” on these apps, because that would cut down quite a number of the problems that we seem to have.
Lord Sheikh: Mary, I notice that you are teacher in Solihull, which is a very diverse area. Are there any problems particularly relating to children from the BME communities? Do you find that there are particular issues there and, if so, how do you deal with them?
Mary McHale: That is not within my knowledge at the moment. If I am being honest with you, in Solihull I have not felt that there are many issues surrounding that. I am sorry, but I would not know what more to say about that because I have not dealt much more with it.
The Chairman: Can I just pick up on the monitoring and filtering? You have found advantages in being able to do that in that it has helped the children as you have been alerted to problems in children’s lives. My earlier question was about children having their mobile phones with them during school hours, which you do not allow, Mary, in your establishments. That means that you are only picking up the monitoring and filtering activity in relation to the child who goes online using the school’s equipment.
Mary McHale: The network.
The Chairman: Did it go through your mind that if there was a more liberal policy in carrying your phone around with you that you would get more information and that the monitoring and filtering that you were finding rather helpful might be more extensive than it is?
Mary McHale: That is an interesting point. The amount of work that that would create would be unmanageable.
The Chairman: You could not cope.
Mary McHale: We have the filtering just on our networking system. We deal with any students or parents who come in who are concerned, but it does not extend to their own personal devices at all. Our sixth-form students are allowed to bring in their own device, so our policy extends over that, but just in the sixth form. That would be just key stage 5.
The Chairman: That is interesting.
Baroness Benjamin: Do you have parents who are monitoring at home who are using the system?
Mary McHale: We do. Parents are sometimes unaware of what their service providers can do. BT and Sky have very good ways in which you can monitor and filter what children can access at home. I have to say that parents are unaware of that. When we come to the e-safety parents’ evenings we give them step-by-step plans so that they can put this on to their own systems. It is really beneficial for them at home.
The Chairman: I bet the children curse you for that.
Mary McHale: Yes. The children do not want me to show that to the parents, no.
Karl Hopwood: Can I add something to that, if that is okay? I dagree with what we are saying about filtering and monitoring, but the biggest challenge that parents have is when their children are spending time at somebody else’s house and they have not done any of that filtering and monitoring. Yes, we must do it; we really need to do it, especially for younger children as there is some dreadful stuff out there. We also have to make sure that there is a channel of communication and that when—not if, sadly—they see something that has upset them or bothered them, they can come and tell somebody. I worry that too many parents think, “I have some really good filtering on there. That is it. Job done. Tick”. It is so much more than that. I am sure you know that already but I just think it is important to say.
Baroness Kidron: I was really interested earlier when you used the phrase “digital citizen”. I am curious about this age-group thing, because, with filtering, monitoring and so on, when you get kids who are 16 or 17, the idea of parental control in that sense is inappropriate rather than appropriate. I am interested to know whether you feel that there is anything one can do to enable young people to become digital citizens and not just protected citizens.
Mary McHale: It needs to start early. Lots of students get to secondary school and they have had some brief e-safety training, but it has not been embedded from a young age. My four year-old son could not type in what program he wanted to play on the iPad so he found the microphone button and was able to tell it. From a very young age, they can use devices really well. We need to start from a very young age and work through ensuring that they are e-safe. That means when they come up and we have a look at their filtering that they are responsible digital citizens because they can see the risks and awareness. They can deal with it then and associate any concerns that they would have or go to their parents or teacher and raise a concern about that. I do feel it needs to start from a young age and work its way up.
Q55 Earl of Caithness: I want to follow up on the age question, but, first, Karl, is there anything that you have found in your travels in Europe that would be of help to us in the UK, or is Europe pretty homogeneous in its approach to this problem?
Karl Hopwood: That is a very good question. One thing that some colleagues, particularly, perhaps, in the Nordic countries, are very good at is that they are more comfortable in discussing some of those more challenging issues around sexual content—pornography and so on. The other thing that they are particularly good at—we have some good examples of this in the UK—is peer-led education. Sometimes that can be quite risky, especially if you are talking about something like sexting, for example. I always remember a student telling other students that, if you were going to send a sexting image, make sure that your head was not in the picture and then nobody would know that it was you. Staff at the school were horrified, but there was a thought that, if it was going to happen, that might be sensible advice. Certainly, one of the things that they are more comfortable with is giving the mantle to young people, because somebody of my age, clearly, to them is over the hill. What do I know? If you can convince them that you do know something, you are okay, but I think young people understand more of the subtleties of it better than we do.
Earl of Caithness: So there is scope for us to learn from that.
Karl Hopwood: Absolutely.
Q56 Earl of Caithness: Going on to age, you have a vast age group of children from 0 to 18 and they are all going to respond at different times. Is there a better way to handle this, and is there any relevance as to whether you are a boy or a girl and whether race or religion comes into it?
Karl Hopwood: If I can jump in quickly, we know a lot more about what affects different groups now. The headline that is often quoted is that girls are twice as likely as boys to be victims of cyberbullying. I think if we know that, we can put some resource in there. It is really important that schools recognise that every year 6 cohort will be different. Quite often I will go into a school and the whole of a year group is using one particular app, which I am not even familiar with, because it happens to be something that is flavour of the month there. This has to be about behaviour for me. There needs to be some sort of progression. It is something that the UK Safer Internet Centre is working on at the moment to try to say to a member of staff who does not know much about this, “We think that, by the age of 11, these are the things, connected with online safety, that young people should know”. Full stop, end of story. You make that your own and you make it fit your pupils, but there has to be some sort of benchmark. I still go into schools and talk to colleagues who are so far off the mark in terms of what they think those children need. The age range is huge, but we are seeing children in key stage 1 who are using things like Instagram, often with parental consent. It is very challenging. Knowing your children, but having something to benchmark it against so that children do not get missed, is important.
Earl of Caithness: You think that 11 is a good age to benchmark rather than 13.
Karl Hopwood: Are you talking now about the age of being able to use social networking and things like that? I just used 11 as the split between key stage 2 and key stage 3. I know that with the COPPA legislation in America the age is 13. Is that what you were referring to?
Earl of Caithness: Yes.
Karl Hopwood: I would say no. It will vary, and that should probably be a decision with which parents are involved. At 13, 16, 10 it does not work now. I am sure that, even if the European Parliament gets its way and we go to 16, it will not work either. For me it is about what they are doing on there, and when it goes wrong they can get some support. That is just a personal view.
Mary McHale: I agree. They have recommendations for age, but students use apps such as Instagram or Snapchat at 13. I can tell from working in our locality that there would be students at the age of eight and nine using these. There is no one to say that they need to come off it. The app will not turn round and say, “We cannot have you”, because they just change their dates. They are all very savvy about what they need to do to make sure that they are of an age to use that app. When you have age numbers, there is no following through. Who is going to oversee that that is the case? If parents say it is okay for them to use it, that is their decision. The age is a quite difficult situation that we do experience in our school.
I agree with what Karl was saying that by certain ages, with the e-safety learning and the teaching that they should have, benchmarks could be put into place, and that would be very good, so that by a certain age all the students have had e-safety training up to a certain level. As I was saying previously, it should start from a much younger age all the way up. When we come to secondary school, there seems to be a greater emphasis on students being more savvy, more e-safe and protecting themselves online.
Earl of Caithness: Would you categorise those ages a little more clearly for us? How would you want that broken down so that by age six children knew X and by age 11 they knew Y?
Karl Hopwood: That is a piece of work that is being done. I always say to colleagues in school that we talk to children about sex, drugs, alcohol and tobacco before they should be getting anywhere near any of that stuff. If they are using Instagram and social media at the age of eight, although they are not supposed to be, I think we have a duty to give them some support to do that. I am not trying to dodge the question, but it is quite difficult to say. There are things around online reputation, validity and bias that we would want them to know or to have some understanding of—copyright, for example—by the age of 11. We have got that in the computing curriculum already but it just needs a bit of expansion, in my view.
Earl of Caithness: This is the final question from me. Is there sufficient online content addressing the needs and requirements of children, and if there is not in what form should it be?
Mary McHale: There is lots of help and guidance out there, a real plethora of it. What I find of concern at times is that something will be released and there will be some associated dangers with it. There is a growth in these anonymous apps now and students are becoming very good at downloading and using them as they do not believe there are any repercussions because of the word “anonymous” that is associated with it. What happens is that we will react and make sure that we have something in alert, but we should foresee, maybe, some potential problems that could be associated with this before it is released and then we could take a much better approach to it in educating the students.
Karl Hopwood: May I ask what you mean with regard to content to teach them about online safety?
Earl of Caithness: Yes, content specifically for under 18 year-olds.
Karl Hopwood: I, personally, think there is too much. The marketplace is very crowded. It is difficult for schools because some of the content is very good and some of it is very dated, but it is still there. I think there is a role for the Safer Internet Centre in the UK, with some endorsement from government, probably, to say, “This is what we recommend”. I think a really good example is the parents’ example from Internet Matters, which is a phenomenal site. It has everything there that parents need.
Of course, they go to places like ChildNet, the UK Safer Internet Centre and CEOP, but there are an awful lot more. What I worry about is when you go into a school and they say to you, “We have used the CEOP resources”. You say, “How long have you used them for?”, and they have used them for the last eight years. Children see it every year; they tick the box and they think it is done. That is not right, in my view.
Mary McHale: I would agree with that. The NSPCC does some very good ones, but there is not enough time and funding in schools to ensure that someone keeps up to date with all that is going on, because it is a minefield. To keep up to date with everything that is going on, you go to the internet and use the resources, and schools will tend to use certain websites that they become familiar with and they are happy using. So it is the same kind of thing. They are not going to extend the plethora of resources that they have a look at, but there is an awful lot out there. You will find that schools will go to surfs and internet sites that they have found to be very good in the past, but there is an issue in trying to keep up with it all the time and with the different resources that are out there. It is very time-consuming.
Q57 Lord Sheikh: You are both at the sharp end, and I commend you for the work you undertake. As a parliamentarian, I would like your views on two points. First, do you think that government recognise the importance of digital education? Secondly, is there enough funding from government to enable all schools to provide effective digital education? Is there enough space in the curriculum to cover these issues? What are your views on this? Let us start with you, Karl.
Karl Hopwood: In answer to the question of whether the Government take it seriously, part of the Government take it seriously. The DfE has been particularly strong in taking a lead, and I know that DCMS has been in managing the UKCCIS process and things like that. I get the feeling that there is not always a joined-up approach in terms of how it comes down into schools.
With regard to funding, as an ex-headteacher, I am always going to say that, yes, we need more funding, but sometimes it is about more subtle things. Now that Ofsted has incorporated references to online safety in their evaluation schedule, that has been phenomenally powerful in getting schools to address it. I am not somebody who thinks that we should just do something because we are going to be inspected on it, but it is a lever and it has made things safer in schools.
There are possibly areas where we could still do more. We have made it statutory, but in a strange way, through Keeping Children Safe in Education, as opposed to, perhaps, through the curriculum, it is okay because at least we are getting it there. PSHE is the elephant in the room, I suppose. That is where possibly we need to be looking, because the people who deliver that in schools very often are the people who, probably, have a little more understanding of this. There are so many links. It felt last year as though we got almost there in terms of that, and then it stopped. I hope it might start again. That is perhaps where more could be done.
Mary McHale: I would agree. I think the PSHE is critical in school. We use it to teach students about everything outside of passing an exam. It is a real part of their social and emotional well-being. We talk about e-safety. We put careers in there and their future pathways. There are a number of issues that we would talk about with PSHE. We are all for ensuring that it is embedded through our school.
Lord Sheikh: Changing the subject, you talked about the fact that there was a variation in the practice of whether to allow mobile phones to be used by students. I, personally, feel that mobile phones should be completely banned. I am an employer, for example. I am the chairman of four companies. During work time none of my staff is allowed to use mobile phones, full stop. Do you think that a uniform practice could be adopted? I am certainly not very much in favour of mobile phones being used. Do you have any views on this? Can something be done to make it a uniform practice?
Karl Hopwood: I would say no. Where schools are allowing young people to use devices, when it is managed properly—and it has to be managed properly—it is a really good support for learning. It brings all sorts of benefits. I agree with you that where it is not managed well it causes chaos—it really is a problem—but to have a blanket “This is what is going to happen” would curtail what some schools are able to do and it would damage some of the opportunities.
Mary McHale: I believe that some of the schools have already put a huge amount of funding into issuing mobile devices to their students to use them as a teaching and learning resource. Then to have a blanket no would have a detrimental effect on that. It works in our community because we do not have mobile phones—they are not allowed—but another school in the locality might not agree with that at all. It has to be bespoke to the individual school to take a decision on that.
Q58 Baroness Benjamin: It is so encouraging to hear the work that you are doing through your school, because I was in a school this morning and I was absolutely amazed by how many children admitted that they had phones and computers in their bedrooms and were online after the watershed. You said yourself that educating children about online safety is so essential. You hinted just now that PSHE, which is personal, social and health education, is a great way of getting to the heart of the subject matter, but not all schools have a place in their timetable to do that. We know this. A number of our witnesses have agreed and argued that PSHE should be made a mandatory subject on the curriculum, partly because the teaching of PSHE is a bit patchy across the country. A recent Ofsted report stated it was not good enough.
What do you think? Do think it is essential and important that we have it on the curriculum for all schools? Do you agree? What benefits and effect do you think it will have if that was to happen?
Mary McHale: I agree. It works in our community and in a lot of other schools to whom I have spoken and gone to visit. They have it on their curriculum, too, and it does work. As I said, not everything is about passing an exam; it is not just making sure that the students who are coming out of the schools are highly academic but that we have looked after their pastoral issues and ensured that they are wholesome students, who are academic, pastoral and well-rounded when they leave us and the other schools. It is a really intricate part of it.
Ofsted has mentioned talking about British values, democracy and individual liberty. That fits nicely into PSHE. That is not to say that some of the things that we teach in PSHE are not in other curriculum subjects, but by giving it scope in PSHE it just embeds it fully in the curriculum rather than in just one or two subject areas.
Karl Hopwood: I agree. PSHE is vitally important. It seems the right place for online safety to sit, in my view. I know it is much broader than that, but when we started to do e-safety in schools, it sat in the lap of the IT department—I understand why—but for a lot of people it made them think it is a technical issue rather than a behavioural challenge. It would bring consistency. It would force schools to do something. Again, I am not about beating people over the head with a stick, but if we are mandating them to do something, at least we can then say, “Why have you not done it?” and challenge them. It would be welcome.
Baroness Benjamin: At what age would you start?
Karl Hopwood: I would do it as soon as they come into school, right the way through from four.
Baroness Benjamin: One thing I spoke to the children about is keeping the phones in their bedroom, keeping the computers in the bedroom, but learning to switch off. That is one of the elements that the children have to know—that they have to be in charge. Do you think teaching PSHE will help them to understand their responsibilities?
Karl Hopwood: When you have a conversation like that with them, they can understand that. Far too often, we just do something to them. Do not get me wrong because there is a place for parents to say, “These are the rules” and so on, but when you explain to children that the reason why you want them to stop using the phone 45 minutes before they go to sleep is because the blue light suppresses the melatonin and all that sort of thing, they can understand that and it is more difficult to argue against. Being open and providing those opportunities for discussion and for them to ask those questions is so powerful.
Baroness Benjamin: Do you think to teach PSHE would be dependent on what kind of children you have in the area? Do you think it should be a mandatory blanket set of rules about what you have to teach, because a lot of teachers are quite scared about what they are going to say and do? How do you think that we could get through this to make schools and teachers feel comfortable about teaching the subject?
Karl Hopwood: I would like to think that what you would do is to provide a framework, but then for the teachers who have the skills to adapt that framework so that you achieve the outcomes but in a way that is meaningful for your young people.
Baroness Benjamin: What happens if you do not have the skills?
Karl Hopwood: I hope that we can give them the skills. I hope that teachers have the basic skills. There is a place for specialist teaching, very definitely, but I often say to teachers, “Just talk to them about what they do online. You do not need to plan that lesson because they will come back to you. You may not have the answers to all the questions but we can find them out together”. There is a place where we need to have a little technical knowledge or at least know where to get it, but a lot of it is about facilitating the debate and the discussion. If you have a framework to go alongside you, that helps.
Mary McHale: I also teach PSHE—a lot of staff do—across the school, and the kids absolutely love the lessons. We have a head of department who has produced an immense bank of lessons that are synced towards certain key stages. We look through the lessons. It is a time for discussion, so we all know what we are covering. It is all there for us. When it comes to e-safety elements, she will go to the e-safety committee and we will work on that bank of lessons together to make sure we are delivering the correct ones. When she talks about doing something on first aid—we do some first aid in year 8—she talks to them to make sure that we are delivering. The students thoroughly enjoy it as it takes away the emphasis for an exam subject, and it gives them the scope and development just to be able to talk.
The lessons that we have last an hour, the discussions in the classroom are great and all the students take part in them. Even the quietest ones in an academic lesson love the opportunity to discuss and go through the scenarios that we are talking about. In a lot of the lessons that we deliver, we talk about scenarios and what would they do. As I have said, it comes back to the critical scenario of what would they do. What is the easiest option? What is the difficult option? What did they decide? I thoroughly love teaching PSHE, and the students do, too, so I am all for making sure that it is embedded in schools.
Baroness Benjamin: So they are empowered by learning.
Mary McHale: They are. It is for them to make decisions and to think through the process and scenarios that they could potentially be in. As Karl was saying, e-safety comes into that—absolutely. It can be embedded in different subjects, so in computer science we talk about e-safety. That is one of the first things we do in year 7 when they come in. It just helps to make sure that we are covering all the aspects, not in just one subject but in several.
The Chairman: We are coming to our last question.
Baroness Kidron: I have a tiny question. On PSHE, on e-safety, so many young people have said to me, “Once a year I get my e-safety and it is always about content and it is always about safety in a very narrow sense”, but most of their anxiety is social anxiety and social norms, not having any parental help with social norms around the internet. I am interested to hear from both of you very briefly whether setting e-safety within the PSHE framework would allow it to be a richer diet for young people.
Karl Hopwood: It would be, absolutely, in my view, because, for me, e-safety pervades everything that young people are doing. I mentioned at the beginning that I work with these helplines. We work with some general helplines that cover all issues. They reckon that over 90% of things that young people contact them about have an online element. If we could embed it so that it was not something that you did once a year, it would be much more powerful and much more effective. We are not there yet, but if we could do that it would be great.
Mary McHale: I agree. It has to be something that is embedded throughout lots of subjects and not just visited once a year. There is the Safer Internet Day in February. You will find that all schools will celebrate that, but it should not just be one time in the year. It needs to be throughout the year with several reminders. Schools also need to deal with anything that is going on. We have, as I said, the e-safety alerts for the parents, and then we would deliver an assembly to the students to talk about the concerns about it.
We also celebrate their e-safety successes when they have made the right decisions and right choices. This just empowers them. It is something that needs to be not just in PSHE but embedded throughout, and several times throughout the year. What has worked well in our school is having a committee; the students know who the committee members are and they can come and speak to us, and we would be able to talk through the different scenarios and help them with that situation.
Q59 Baroness Quin: I think you have made a very strong case for PSHE. When you were talking about it, you talked also about British values and so on, which seemed more like civic education than PSHE. In taking these subjects together, is there an effort to try to ensure that in the schools you do not duplicate but that you complement the disciplines?
Mary McHale: Because PSHE is such a wide discussion point and there is so much that you can bring into it, that is what makes it so successful in schools. You might talk about British values, e-safety, careers and future pathways. There is scope for you to talk about lots of other things that you might not be able to fit into another academic subject. We are, as teachers, always struggling for time to make sure that we go through so much content because they are going to be examined on it, that it does not give the scope for discussions that we would like to have. Therefore, with PSHE it gives us the scope to sit back and give the students time to talk, to think through things and to talk about the different scenarios. That is what is so beneficial about it, rather than being under pressure that we cannot bring it too much into other lessons because we are going to be examined on the academic part of it at the end of the year or the two years.
Baroness Quin: I want to pick up on something you were saying earlier about training in your own school. I would like to ask both of you whether you feel that there is currently enough training across the board in schools, and, if not, how that should be addressed. Picking up again on the interesting point you made that some of the issues that you are dealing with are almost area-specific, there are issues and apps that are current in your area that may not be used in other schools. If there is a need for more national training, can that training also be designed to be sensitive to the needs of particular schools in particular areas?
Karl Hopwood: One of the challenges is that a lot of local authorities have lost personnel who, perhaps, could have specialised in that. There is some very good practice but there is also some pretty shoddy practice. That is a concern. As an ex-head, you look at all the things that you need to train your staff in, and you have a very limited amount of time to do that; it moves very quickly. There are certain things to do with the behaviours—to do with cyberbullying, for example. We have guidance around cyberbullying that we are waiting to have released at the moment. These are some of the staple things. Then, probably, one or two people in a school need to have some more bespoke training and they become the go-to people, and that can be cascaded and so on. Again, the mandate in Keeping Children Safe in Education says that we now need to incorporate online safety for staff and training is really helpful, but it is then where they go to, to get that.
Baroness Quin: Are there some good local authorities—I know their role has been reduced—in this field?
Karl Hopwood: Absolutely. Take Kent, for example, and Rebecca Avery, who is the e-safety officer. There was a time when that post was going to go. She now has somebody else working with her. She is nationally recognised, and the work that they do around policies for schools is second to none. It is really useful. Also, we have the UK Safer Internet Centre. I work alongside them, and they would expect me to say this, but they need to be better at promoting themselves as the people to go to for this sort of content. Perhaps government has a role to endorse a bit more forcefully that there is good stuff here.
Q60 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall: After what Mr Hopwood just said, I wanted to go back to the question I would have asked a moment ago. In your experience, Mr Hopwood, of not just your own school but many schools, first, can you give us, very briefly, any indication of why there is resistance in certain schools to incorporating all the things that you have put under the broad heading of PSHE but specifically to do with internet-related things? Is there anything general about the kinds of schools that do not want to engage with that? Secondly, since you have now said it, do you think that it would be important to renew the pressure to have PSHE included in the curriculum as a matter of statute?
Karl Hopwood: Yes, very definitely, to the last bit. That is quite easy. As to why there has been resistance, I believe that for something to happen effectively in a school it needs to come from the top. Quite often you have people on the senior leadership team who do not think that this is a huge issue. I had a headteacher recently who said to me, “We do not need to worry too much about this because they are meant to be 13 to use that. they cannot access it in school; it is not my problem”, which I found shocking, but that is some of the concern. I also think—we have not touched on this—there is a real naivety with some colleagues about just what young people are having to deal with. If they knew, then perhaps they would think, “Crikey, we do need to step up and do something about this”. Part of me understands why they are not aware of what it is.
There is always the pressure. Small schools, lots of different hats, “Where do we find the time to do this?”, but for me it is great that it is in Keeping Children Safe in Education, because this is about safeguarding young people. Many of them talk to me on a daily basis and tell me what has happened, because I then disappear at the end of the day and I am not seen as a threat in that sense. We have to change those attitudes and opinions because this is about keeping children safe.
The Chairman: Last word, Mary.
Mary McHale: I agree with what Karl was saying. It is difficult regarding time. I remember many years ago when I started this, my headteacher said, “Just have a look over this for me”, and I became intrigued by how much the students could access. They were signing up to some of these forums; you would have these alerts coming through and then you would hear the concerns from the students. It was a personal love of what is going on with the digital world and keeping up to date with what has happened that has led to us being so successful, but it has taken a lot of time and commitment. You have to have a real love and passion for it to do this. I believe schools see this as a huge problem, so where do they start? That is why our community is hoping to help the other schools, especially the primary schools, to say, “I know that this is water that is a bit scary to get involved in, in the first instance, but if we help you and we lead together we will make sure that your school is, hopefully, just as e-safe as ours”.
You do need more accreditation. Parents always love accreditations for schools, but they are very costly. We are at a level where we could have an accreditation for our school, but it would be an extra £1,500. Everything is so tight. We know that we are doing the work on the ground and we would love to have accreditations, but the funding is not always there to ensure that we are promoting how e-safe we really are. We know ourselves and our parents know, and we are working with the local community, too. There has to be an approach where lots of schools may be banked together—that might be a solution—where you take a school that is doing well and then you work with other schools in your locality and you help them find their feet regarding e-safety, because it is, as I said, an integral part of the safeguarding policies now in all the schools.
The Chairman: We congratulate you both on doing, obviously, some fantastic work—it is really impressive—and for bringing us the combination of that practical understanding and the policy dimension, which is incredibly helpful to us. If you see a recommendation about PSHE in our final report, you might get some credit for that. Who knows? Thank you both very much indeed for joining us.
Mary McHale: It was lovely. Thank you very much.