Best practice for primary student email addresses?

[Mr_Jiminy]

For a primary school can the pupils email address reference their names?

 

For example - [email protected]

 

Or should the forenames/surnames not be referenced in full?

 

Confused by the best practice method.

 

Mod Note

Split from another thread

Edited September 12, 2020 by elsiegee40

[CHiLL]

The general agreed practice, regardless of the student's age, is that they cannot send or receive emails from outside of the domain. The only exceptions we have in our emails is that they can receive emails from online educational resource sites that the school has signed up for, so that they can register and also reset their own passwords. GCSEPod is an example that springs to mind. This is starting to become less common recently, since a lot of sites are able to be configured with O365 SSO.

 

Using that approach, their usernames/email addresses aren't being exposed outside of the domain, except for GDPR compliant educational resources...the username format doesn't really matter. Though we specifically use the format in your example for ease. Intake year, first letter of forename and surname. It's quicker to type than the student's full name. Sure, we often have duplicates...but they just get a number appended to the end of their username. Better than the previous username format on the system I inherited: Year they leave year 11, first three letters of their forename and first four letters of their surname. So a new year 7 called James Smith currently gets the username: 20JSmith, whereas on the old system it would be 25JamSmit. I have no idea why they chose to do it that way and it offends me! It's one of the first things I changed when I started.

[Steve21]

The general agreed practice, regardless of the student's age, is that they cannot send or receive emails from outside of the domain.

 

Not sure where that's come from? Never seen that suggested in any documentation, and think it's the totally wrong approach to teaching students how to use IT correctly...

 

How are students applying for things like work experience? UCAS? (As two random examples)

 

(Edit - Unless some mod ninja'd split this into primary only thread! Was reading this in the other thread originally)

 

Steve

Edited September 12, 2020 by Steve21

[CHiLL]

Not sure where that's come from? Never seen that suggested in any documentation, and think it's the totally wrong approach to teaching students how to use IT correctly...

 

How are students applying for things like work experience? UCAS? (As two random examples)

 

Steve

This is the third school I've worked in that uses this approach and something I've seen people say they do on here over the years. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just going off personal experience and observations over the years.

 

We use exceptions to allow students to send/receive from specific domains, such as GCSEPod, UCAS, etc. These exceptions can be added to, providing it is approved by a higher up.

[fiza]

For primary we have internal emails only unless whitelisted domain.

 

For Secondary - Y7-Y11 are restricted to internal emails only unless it is a whitelisted domain. 6th form is not restricted so they can apply for University etc. Been like that for years and works well for us.

 

Year of Entry plus surname & initial for both primary and secondary , Separate G Suite domains .

Edited September 12, 2020 by fiza

[Boredguy]

Not sure where that's come from? Never seen that suggested in any documentation, and think it's the totally wrong approach to teaching students how to use IT correctly...

 

How are students applying for things like work experience? UCAS? (As two random examples)

 

(Edit - Unless some mod ninja'd split this into primary only thread! Was reading this in the other thread originally)

 

Steve

 

It came from the old Becta guidance that e-mail accounts should not be identifiable with students names, but that quango was shut down a decade ago, back when e-mail accounts were not used for anything really other than sending messages

Edited September 12, 2020 by Boredguy

[GrumbleDook]

It came from the old Becta guidance that e-mail accounts should not be identifiable with students names, but that quango was shut down a decade ago, back when e-mail accounts were not used for anything really other than sending messages

 

No, the advice was that the sending/receiving of emails outside of the school should be used appropriately and based on the competency and safety of the children involved. Generally, KS1 - No, KS2 - unlikely, KS3 - possibly, KS4, only if a risk, KS5 - you want to stop it? Why?

Guidance on this has had updates from UKCIS (Formerly UKCCIS) and is available via the Education for a Connected World resource.

 

I did a presentation for the #UKEdChat conference earlier in the year on access to materials to help decide when a child can use digital tools and understand about privacy/data protection.

[dobbyit]

I’m primary based, we have YOEfirstname.surname for reception to year 6

This is for AD, email, purple mash, ttrockstars,

We use office365 for children to send work homework to teachers in ks1 and 2 and looking into teams

[Michael]

I adopt the same format [email protected] and likewise apply Exchange Rules which deletes all mail sent externally, other than domains added on an exception list.

 

We have to remember Primary pupils are learning the concept of usernames, passwords and ownership of these accounts. The least we can do is make it easy and keep their accounts clean and relevant.

 

In Active Directory, I do specify their first and last names. Firstly we can identify them from an administrative perspective, but also from a Safeguarding perspective is something's flagged.