Case Study:
Brunswick House Primary School
With remote education comes new challenges for schools as educators adapt to a new way of teaching. This includes safeguarding.
Brunswick House Primary School in Maidstone, Kent, has fully embraced a culture of remote online safeguarding, through both achieving their certified school status and also by beginning the journey of working towards our brand-new Safe Remote Education Accreditation too.
Their Computing and Key Stage 1 Leader, Stephen Fenniche, explained how crucial protecting pupils online is, before talking about the subsequent steps the school has taken in order to make this a reality.
Importance of online safety
From both a personal and wider standpoint, Mr Fenniche was keen to stress just how much of a priority online safety is at Brunswick House.
Mr Fenniche said: “I’m the computing lead for the school, and I have been for a number of years now. Also, recently I’ve been leading on remote learning as well so I have been able to work with the Leadership Team very closely with regards to online safety.
“Online safety has always been a very high priority here and we’re always trying to promote it. Within the computing curriculum itself, it’s ever present on our agenda.”
Safe Remote Education Accreditation
Recently, we launched our new Safe Remote Education Accreditation, to give schools that safeguarding assurance during these unprecedented times.
Mr Fenniche highly praised the programme and revealed that he has already garnered several new learning points from it – something which will be vital moving forward.
“It’s a new to all of us, but I’ve been using the resources that you have been providing in order to work towards the Safe Remote Education Accreditation,” he revealed.
“As well as working towards the accreditation, it’s also a good learning point for me too, because it is all new, so it’s lovely to make it all beneficial for the children – I’m very grateful.”
Benefits of remote CPD
Staff uptake has also been another positive for the school, with everyone really keen to empower themselves and enhance their online safety knowledge.
He stated: “The support has been really beneficial, and I believe that online CPD is the best bet for us, because we can just roll it out to staff and they can work through it at their leisure.
“Staff have found it really beneficial and they’ve also noted that having those tests at the end of courses ensured that they learned a lot more.
“We’ve always had really good feedback from them.”
Working together to safeguard pupils
Upon achieving their certified status in January of this year, the school couldn’t hide their collective pride according to Mr Fenniche, after a real team effort in the community.
“The pride comes from the fact that everyone’s worked together on it,” he explained.
“We’ve had DSLs, governors, senior leaders and everyone’s got involved in it, which is really good.
“This has given us the opportunity to go and work on something as a community, and it’s just a mark of that approval too.
“I think it’s always gratifying to have something you can show after putting in a lot of hard work as a collective.”