Last month, Webanywhere invited schools and teachers to take part on a e-safety questionnaire (you can see our original blog post here) – and last week, we compiled the results. If you took part- thank you! You’ve helped us build a picture of the state of e-safety in UK primary schools – and here are the results.
The survey revealed that, astonishingly, 63% of teachers don’t feel they have any influence over whether a child uses social networking sites, such as Facebook. Facebook, incidentally, has a minimum user age of 13.
And almost a third – 30% – feel they haven’t had adequate training on how to deal with cyberbullying.
The survey also revealed that 55% were aware that between one and five pupils had been a victim of cyberbullying at their school in the past 12 months.
The purpose of this questionnaire was originally to get a better insight into how schools feel about -and are affected by – e-safety issues. However, since seeing these results we decided to speak one of our customers about the issue – as well as an independent e-safety expert.
Jo Corrigan, Headteacher at Eastlands Primary School in Rugby – who hold an SWGfL 360 safe accreditation and has two members of staff registered as CEOP Ambassadors – took part in the survey and said: “The teaching and learning of internet safety is extremely important from an early age. Key to educating the children is ensuring staff are appropriately trained.
“At Eastlands Primary School we try to develop innovative ways of engaging parents and children with the safe use of the internet – for example, ‘speed-e-learning’ workshops.”
John Carr OBE, Secretary of the UK’s Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety, said: “Teachers can’t teach if they don’t feel confident in relation to the subject they are meant to be teaching about. This survey shows that too many teachers do not feel they have been given proper support to enable them to do their job. That has to be fixed, as a matter of priority.
The full results of the survey, in colourful pier charts, can be seen below. If you’d like to find out more about e-safety, or if you would like to learn more about our free e-safety events, please email info@webanywhere.co.uk.
