News
Smoothwall Releases An Alerts-Based Safeguarding Reporting Mechanism to help Schools address Government and Ofsted Mandates
March 2016 by Marc Jacob
This month Smoothwall releases its alert-based Safeguarding reports that notify school safeguarding teams when students are engaged in risky or dangerous online behaviour.
Available to current web filtering customers as part of the Framlingham product release, the reports are designed to facilitate the effective provisioning of safeguarding in school environments, and address legal mandates set out by the UK Government including the Prevent Duty and Keeping Children Safe Online draft legislation due to come into effect in September 2016.
Safeguarding reporting enables Systems Administrators at schools and colleges to generate meaningful analysis on search terms entered and URLs accessed over various timeframes, to establish user activity that has breached one or many of 7 out of the box rulesets: radicalisation, suicide, abuse, substance abuse, bullying, criminal activity and adult content. Category rulesets are linked to Smoothwall’s existing web filter categories, and each category has a severity assigned to it.
Reporting in this way helps schools to meet increased safeguarding obligations outlined in the UK Government’s Prevent Duty while also generating evidence that can be used by school leaders in their next Ofsted inspection to demonstrate compliance. “Many schools are still in a state a flux when it comes to understanding what policy makers and regulators require from a safeguarding perspective because the law surrounding is constantly evolving”, says Head of Product, Phil Smith.
“This latest safeguarding enhancement coupled with further safeguarding specific developments planned for 2016 will go a long way towards helping our customers meet their safeguarding obligations now and in the future? these enhancements also demonstrate our ability to be proactive and respond to the challenges of educators.”
Following the rollout of safeguarding reports that monitor search terms and URLs, the next phase of development will extend the reporting functionality to include instant messaging and social media reporting.
In addition to the outlined safeguarding enhancements, Smoothwall’s existing customers can expect Framlingham to include a new directory type for Chromebooks that allows users to be filtered based on their Google Apps group membership without the need to link to Google via an Active Directory.
