Does Your Filtering Systems Work Across All School Devices Including Mobiles?

A new school year means new focus!

No doubt, schools need to ensure that their communities are as safe as they can be for the start of the year and ensuring a safer internet system should be considered a priority around this time.

Since 2016, the UK Safer Internet Centre has shown educational establishments, as well as some of the leading filtering providers, how to establish ‘appropriate levels’ of filtering and monitoring.

While it is encouraging to see schools take an active role in ensuring harmful material is effectively blocked across their school systems, it is essential to ensure that this covers all devices.

One specific action that we are encouraging schools to do at the start of this academic year is to  ‘satisfy themselves that filtering and monitoring are correctly working across all their devices’, specifically their mobile devices.

If your school owns mobile devices such as iPads or other tablets as part of your teaching strategy, then consider the following practices to ensure filtering is in place (you may need the help of your ICT support to do this):

1) Audit the mobile device estate by detailing all the mobile devices they have.  This can be made easier if the school manage apps through a Mobile Device Management (MDM). 

2) Understand and detail the applications (apps) they use and how these are managed (installed and deleted). Specifically, ensure that apps can be centrally, and routinely, removed from mobile devices.

3) Identify who is responsible for mobile devices as well as filtering and monitoring solutions at the school, ensuring that the DSL is also aware (if different).

4) Test to provide confidence that the schools filtering and monitoring solution is working across all mobile devices and across installed apps (not just internet browsers).  Schools can use testfiltering.com to help in this regard.

5) Identify any vulnerable users of mobile devices, paying particular attention to ensure harmful content is not accessible on specific devices

It is also a good time to take this opportunity to:

•          Communicate the school’s reporting mechanism with all those who use devices

•          Ensure acceptable use policies are clear, understood and respected by all

If schools need support with understanding more about their filtering systems, then a good start is knowing just how effective your school’s internet system is in blocking out harmful content such as terrorist material and child sexual abuse content. Test your connection for free right here:

Test Filtering