Case Study:
Alt Bridge School

Recognising the importance of keeping pupils safe in the digital world, Alt Bridge School chose to take a cohesive approach to online safety with our Certified School programme.

Gary Reddin, Leader of the Virtual Curriculum, is delighted that the school has achieved their Certified School accreditation.

Embedding a whole-school approach

He highlighted the importance of taking a whole-school approach:

“For us, we think one of our top things about safeguarding is our children’s attitudes towards being safe online and making sure that we really hammer that home.”

“It was linked together and linked to the school objectives, it showed that we were working towards that accreditation and showed us why we were working towards that accreditation.” he explained.

“We’d done a lot of work about online safety, but it was all disjointed, it wasn’t cohesive.”

When it came to choosing National Online Safety, Gary revealed that the school was impressed with the wide range of resources and the cohesive nature of the package.

“National Online Safety was a wraparound qualification and accreditation for the school.”

He added: “We had a new headteacher start and they were very aware of the issues that our children have had online and the safeguarding aspect of things.”

Engaging the whole school community

A key benefit for Alt Bridge School was the Certified School programme’s role-specific training, with the ability to empower all members of the school community to keep children safe online.

“Because we’ve got our NOS accreditation, every single teacher is a teacher of online safety. It’s not something that’s done by just an ICT teacher, it’s done by every single member of staff – we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.”

“That was what attracted us to National Online Safety. It was something which was accessible for all members of staff, whether they were a specialist or non-specialist.”

“With this, the message was strong from the outset.”

“It was good to see that every single member of staff at every single level, from SLT, right the way down – every member of staff was involved.”