As a safeguarding team, we’re often posed the question: ‘I’ve been asked to run a parent session on online safety—what should we do?’ These evenings are often intimidating for teachers: how do you ensure parents turn up, and once they’re sitting down, what should you teach them?
Firstly, ask yourself (and your SLT) if a parent session is really the best way to keep parents and carers informed. Our top recommendation is drip-feeding information to families throughout the year, making the news and advice less overwhelming. If you send home a regular newsletter about curriculum or events, why not add an online safety pointer or resource to each issue? It’s an easy way to make a regular impact on parents’ understanding of current issues and trends.
Face-to-face sessions can be very helpful too—but ensure you stop to consider whether a stand-alone ‘big bang’ annual approach is the most effective. Will parents come? Will all your efforts lead to measurable, sustainable support? If the answer to these questions is ‘no’, it might be time to rethink your school’s technique. One more efficient method is to include an online safety briefing within another event where parental attendance is guaranteed.
Once you have decided the best way to approach a face-to-face event, here are some ways to run an interesting and informative parent online safety seminar.
Find out if parents feel confident discussing online safety with their children
A good way to spark a productive discussion is to present the following statistics (compiled from our Hopes and Streams survey of 40,000 young people) on screen as parents enter the session:
- Two in five pupils have never told anyone about the worst thing that has happened to them online
- But of those who did, 94% told someone they knew, and 71% chose to confide in a parent/carer
- 73% of pupils trust parents’ advice on online safety, but only 56% talk about it more than once a year
Ask parents if they feel confident talking about online safety with their children; point out that the first two statistics prove why it’s so important that families are open with each other. The third statistic demonstrates that children recognise that adults’ life experience and wisdom is helpful when facing a challenge online, even if it’s on an app, site or game that parents have never heard of, let alone used!