Freedom of Information Request - Reference: 10522

    
     1. Internet Safety Education provided as part of the school
     curriculum.
    
     - Within your schools has a specific program aimed at teaching
     children about staying safe online, including cyber bullying been
     integrated into the curriculum?
     - If yes, who is responsible for delivery and what
     accreditations/training have they received? For example, teacher,
     CEOP trained ambassador.
     - If yes, how often is internet safety training integrated into the
     school curriculum, i.e. weekly, monthly etc
     - If no, what steps/timeframes are being taken for implementation?

Reply:

18 of our 19 secondary schools have CEOP trained staff (almost 150 teachers) with the 19^th to follow. Four of these schools have CEOP trained trainers. These teachers come from a number of departments, e.g. Guidance/Pupil support, Computing, Business Education, Library staff, and they deliver the CEOP courses to young people at various stages from S1 upwards.

Staff from primary schools attended a CEOP training course in 2007. However, it is not necessary for primary staff to be trained by a CEOP trainer in order to use the CEOP material available on their website as this is open to anyone and does not require a password, unlike the secondary material.

In addition to the CEOP material, information evenings were offered to both primary and secondary staff as an introduction to the Keeping Myself Safe pack produced by Learning Curve.

Many primary schools explore Internet Safety through their Safety Days or Health and Wellbeing days when the police give an input. In addition to this the Safe Fifer Days which primary pupils attend have an Internet Safety element delivered by the Police.

Fife Child Protection Committee's Internet/Mobile Phone Safety Campaign was initially launched in June 2007 and supported with bespoke Information and Advice Leaflets and Mouse Mats - for children, young people, parents and carers. Approx £20,000k was invested by Fife CPC from its dedicated budget. The materials were widely distributed across all Schools in Fife - approx 50,000 children and young people. The campaign was taken forward in terms of the CPC Annual Plan 2007 - 2008 and was supported on the child protection website at www.fifechildprotection.org.uk

All Fife schools are directed to the dedicated Learning and Teaching websites created by Fife Education within which there are pages devoted to Internet Safety.

Please visit:

http://www.fife-education.org.uk/ict_in_education/index.htm

http://www.fife-education.org.uk/Internet_Safety/index.htm

In particular, primary pupils have Internet Safety included in their own dedicated Fife Primary Pupils' website under the Health and Safety at

http://www.fife-education.org.uk/Fife_Primary_Website/pupil_pages/health/internet_safety.htm

and at

http://www.fife-education.org.uk/Fife_Primary_Website/internet_policy/index.htm

    
     2. Internet Filtering
    
     - Do the primary and secondary schools within your authority have
     internet filtering in place?
     - If yes, what tools do you use? For example Hardware or Software?
     - If yes, what is the name of your internet filtering supplier and
     when was their contract last renewed/due for renewal?

Reply:

All Fife schools' internet access is first directed through our web filtering software (a commercial product). There are different settings to match the user - pupil and staff.

Our contract is renewed annually.

In addition, incoming internet traffic is first passed to our firewall server which filters out unwanted materials and also protects our users and equipment from viruses and other malicious attacks.

The name of the internet filtering supplier is exempt from being released under Section 39 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, which states that release of the information would, or would be likely to, endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual.

This exemption is subject to the public interest test. In deciding not to disclose the name of the filtering supplier Fife Council have considered that it would be in the public's, and in this instance more specifically, pupil's interest not to do so. Fife Council has a duty to protect it's school pupil's and feel that by providing the name of the filtering supplier could increase the chance of someone being able to bypass our filtering and logging capability. If security was breached in such a way there may be the possibility of pupil's gaining access to inappropriate material, resulting in physical or mental harm.

    
     3. Internet Filtering Breaches
    
     - Have any of the Schools within the past 24 months experienced a
     breach of Internet Filtering where children were able to access
     pornography or Indecent images. Please provide details of School
     Type(Primary or Secondary), Date of Breach and Type of Unsuitable
     material accessed.
     - If a breach of security occurred how was your authority notified?
     For example, by a parent, by the school, through an automated alert
     provided by hardware/software supplier.
    

Reply:

Occasionally teachers inform the Help Desk of inappropriate material accessed through searching for particular words and this is investigated and the site blocked. Fife imposes a `safe search' option onto every search especially when the user is searching for images.

Our contractor is always checking for sites moving to new addresses and our filter blocks are updated frequently at the centre which is the only portal school PCs are able to go through to access the internet.

In the past two years there has only been one reported instance leading to IT, school staff and parents meeting to discuss the procedures.