Tuesday 14th March 2017
Dear Parents and Carers,
E-safety and mobile phone use
This week we have had to deal with an unfortunate series of events between a small number of our Year 6 children relating to the use of mobile phones. Some pupils had forwarded on inappropriate texts they themselves had received.
I have spoken to both classes about this and reminded them about our expectations and the huge level of responsibility that goes with being allowed to have a phone. We also discussed consequences!
The best advice we can give you is to ask to see the inbox of the phone, check their online search history and if they do have access to social media then ask to look at their pages on a regular basis i.e. there should be nothing on there that you wouldn’t want me to see.
We will be running our own e-safety week in May and will provide more advice for parents and pupils. We have sent home an e-safety magazine for parents last week. If this didn’t get to you then we have spare copies at the school office.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, this is a free phone app which allows free instant messages between users where there can be conversations and photos / film and clips sent one to one or between groups; voice calls can also be made. It would seem that some of our Year 6 pupils have this app on their phone.
WhatsApp actually states that this App should only be used by 16 year olds or older so it is a concern that so many children have had access to the App. In some cases in the past parents don’t know that their children had it.
Our advice to parents is if your child has a mobile device and access to something like WhatsApp, is to insist that you read through their conversations regularly through the week so that the children know that you will monitor them. Again some parents have told us that they don’t do this and so their children have had a free reign. Alternatively the answer is to say that they can’t have the App because WhatsApp only allows 16 year olds+.
Information re Facebook
We have also written to parents before about issues relating to Facebook. This modern phenomenon has many pros but it also has many cons.
Firstly can I say that we do not advocate any primary aged child having a Facebook profile. Facebook itself states that you must be 13 years or older to open an account however the site itself doesn’t have a way of detecting the real age of the person signing up. I know that we have pupils in our school, some as young as Year 3, with Facebook pages.
Many parents who I have spoken to in the past about this issue have insisted that their child does not have such a page but on closer inspection they have found out that they do. Again the key issue here for parents is how you monitor your child’s access to the internet in the home and through hand held devices
e.g. knowing all of their passwords to sites and not letting them use laptops etc out of your sight are good measures.
Despite all of our efforts we still have the odd occasion when children have made wrong choices about how they use their phone or websites such as Facebook or Youtube. Every time we unpick one of these situations which have happened outside of school, it seems that the child has had unsupervised access to the internet for a prolonged period of time.
We all need to remember that our children are possibly far more proficient online than we are and we all need to keep up so that we are one step ahead of them in order to protect them.
Yours truly,
Michael Roach
Head teacher
John Ball Primary School