Filtering and monitoring – core standard

Schools and colleges have a statutory responsibility to keep children and young people safe online as well as offline. Governing bodies and proprietors should make sure their school or college has appropriate filtering and monitoring systems in place, as detailed in the statutory guidance, keeping children safe in education.

Filtering and monitoring is one of the 6 core standards. Schools should be meeting this standard now and working towards meeting all 6 core standards by 2030. These standards help school and college leaders, designated safeguarding leads and IT support understand how to work together to make sure they can effectively safeguard their students and staff.

Filtering is preventative. It refers to solutions that protect users from accessing illegal, inappropriate and potentially harmful content online. It does this by identifying and blocking specific web links and web content in the form of text, images, audio and video.

Monitoring is reactive. It refers to solutions that monitor what users are doing on devices and in some cases, records this activity. Monitoring can be manual, for example, teachers viewing screens as they walk around a classroom. Technical monitoring solutions rely on software applied to a device that views a user’s activity. Reports or alerts are generated based on illegal, inappropriate, or potentially harmful activities, including bullying. Monitoring solutions do not block users from seeing or doing anything.