Filtering and Monitoring
Cornerstone Trust keep students safe from digital threats by monitoring school device applications for concerning topics, including: Mental health Bullying Sextortion Hate speech Racism Exploitation Drugs Weapons Radicalization Extremism Grooming Pornography Physical abuse
Filtering by Schools Broadband
Like many schools, our broadband is provided by the Schools’ Broadband service. Schools Broadband’s unique, hosted OPEX-based service, provides broadband, filtering and monitoring, together with online safeguarding and security to trusts of all sizes, across multiple academy locations.Their centralised management, reporting and alerting platform streamlines safeguarding, firewall, and filtering management, ensuring the safety of students, network and trust-wide regulatory compliance.
Over 3000 schools across 275 MATs already trust Schools Broadband’s ISPA Award-winning service to protect their students, their data and their costs.
Monitoring by Senso
All school devices run a programme called Senso, which monitors both keystrokes in all apps, but also Microsoft Teams both on their device and in the cloud. This means that if a pupil uses Teams at home, on a mobile device, games console or even smart TV, their actions and chat are monitored. In this way we can ensure a safer way for pupils to interact with each other than the alternative solutions such as WhatsApp and snapchat that they often otherwise join.
Where a word or comment is flagged by the system, depending on the level of severity it is either emailed to safeguarding staff to address with pupils or in more urgent cases a phone call will occur.
Monitoring by SWGfL
Our monitoring solution is supported by additional layers of monitoring from the South West Grid for Learning. As well as being a provider for this region, they are also internationally known for the quality of their online safety tools and resources for education.
We subscribe to a human oversight of all incidents identified by Senso, so that a professional at SWGfL reviews each event and decides on the correct level of response. In this way we are either emailed or phoned depending on the urgency of the event.
Course Correction
The trust Online Safety Group is made up of trustees, leaders across the schools, members of the safeguarding team, class teachers and other professionals, such as a school nurse. The group meets half termly to examine recent incidents and identify trends and the action the trust should take to address them. As part of their work the group reviews and summarises the Senso data.
At each trustee meeting, the trustees review the latest report from the Online Safety Group.
