Online Safety

Online safety is an umbrella term for promoting the safeguarding of children and young people when using any device over the internet. Online technologies have become integral to the lives of children and young people in today’s society, both within schools and in their lives outside school. The internet and other digital and information technologies, including AI, are powerful tools, which open up new opportunities for everyone.

Electronic communication and AI tools (including generative AI) help teachers and pupils learn from each other. These technologies can stimulate discussion, promote creativity and increase awareness of context to promote effective learning. However, it must also be remembered that children and young people have an entitlement to safe internet access at all times. Whilst the use of these exciting and innovative tools in school and at home has been shown to raise educational standards and promote pupil achievement, the use of these new technologies can put young people at risk within and outside the school.

We consider these risks through the established 4Cs framework:

Content (exposure to illegal, inappropriate or harmful material, including misinformation and disinformation).

Contact (harmful interactions with other users, including adults seeking to groom or exploit, and increasingly with AI chatbots and companion-style applications that simulate human interaction).

Conduct (a pupil’s own behaviour online that increases risk or causes harm to themselves or others, including the making, sending or receiving of explicit images — whether real, digitally altered or wholly AI-generated).

Commerce (risks such as online gambling, inappropriate advertising, phishing and financial scams). This framework underpins how we identify, assess and respond to online safety concerns.

It is therefore essential, through good educational provision, to build our pupils’ resilience to the risks to which they may be exposed, so that they have the confidence, judgment and skills to face and deal with these risks.

Many adults believe that young people know more about technology than they do, but there is more to technology than the technology itself. The internet, now more than ever, is about relationships, choices and respect. Its proper usage requires wisdom, positive personal values, emotional intelligence and self-reflection, and this is where schools can really take a lead, something we focus on doing here at Marlborough. It is our firm belief that as educators we have a responsibility to teach our pupils how to make good choices when it comes to their online behaviour, whilst providing the necessary safeguards via blocking, filtering, monitoring and escalation processes.

The effectiveness of our filtering and monitoring systems is formally reviewed at least once every academic year, with oversight from the Head of IT, Safeguarding and Senior Leadership team, in line with statutory requirements. This sits alongside our approach to mobile phones: in line with DfE guidance, Marlborough operates as a phone-free environment by default during lessons, breaktimes and lunchtimes, helping to reduce unsupervised and unsupervised device use as a source of online risk.

Our Online Safety policy can be accessed here.

Our Mobile Phone Policy and AI Policy are accessible via the Parent Portal.

Useful Sources of Information for Parents –

Reporting / help if something’s gone wrong

CEOP Safety Centre — to report a concern about grooming or sexual abuse directed at a child online.
Report Harmful Content — for reporting harmful content that doesn’t meet platforms’ own removal thresholds.