At the Spring 1 Computing Network Meeting, eleven Computing Leads from around the borough gathered on a Friday afternoon to eat sandwiches, drink tea and discuss online safety.

After previous half-termly sessions on ‘Preparing for an Ofsted Deepdive in Computing’ and ‘Sharing Best Practice in Assessment’, this Session was about how to approach the important topic of Online Safety in schools.

Leaders discussed how they taught the subject at their schools, the difficulties they faced, what they have tried on Safer Internet Day and how to gather evidence of good practice across their school.

Key takeaways included the free online resource ‘Project Evolve’ which is based on the 8 strands of online safety put forward by the Government in their ‘Teaching Online Safety in Schools’ framework. Project Evolve also provides free lesson slides for key objectives and an assessment tool to find out what students already know about online safety.

Ideas were shared about organising parent meetings and staff insets focused on Online Safety with presentation templates provided. Whole school assembly resources were also included.

The next meeting will involve a trip to the BETT show together on 31/3/23 followed by a Programming session with Scratch on 19/5/23. If you are a Computing Lead, we hope to see you at a future event. They are all free and included in your SLA. Sign up to these sessions using our Client Portal.