Andrew Tate and school filtering

[localzuk]

Similar problems for a "Violence" category - News articles? Historical accounts? Fictional stories? The Bible?.

 

I think this is where multi-level analysis like that done by some monitoring systems comes in.

 

Eg. Classroom Cloud, a site itself can be flagged as low risk - eg BBC News, but then an individual page within it could flag up as higher risk due to the content of that page. It then takes into account whether the computer was being watched by the teacher at the time, and whether the user has been looking at a sequence of higher risk sites to give an overall score.

 

That sort of multi-factor decision making is likely the best way forward, as it allows a much less crude way of filtering/monitoring.

 

How you'd apply that to filtering is a different matter though!

[Opendium_Steve]

Eg. Classroom Cloud, a site itself can be flagged as low risk - eg BBC News, but then an individual page within it could flag up as higher risk due to the content of that page. It then takes into account whether the computer was being watched by the teacher at the time, and whether the user has been looking at a sequence of higher risk sites to give an overall score.

 

That sort of multi-factor decision making is likely the best way forward, as it allows a much less crude way of filtering/monitoring.

 

How you'd apply that to filtering is a different matter though!

Yes, absolutely! But that fundamentally doesn't change my point that I don't think AI is a magic bullet to solve these problems - AI can do text classification, just as keyword analysis can do. AI can probably do it slightly better, but it is way more resource heavy and I just don't think that text classification is really where the challenge is - expending orders of magnitude more resources to gain a marginal improvement in text classification doesn't actually make a significant difference to how well filtering / monitoring systems do what you want them to do.

 

 

There's also the question of how capable schools are at setting this stuff up - even though its possible, in my experience its rare to see schools setting their filters up to know where/when students are being supervised and tweaking the filtering for those circumstances.

[mavhc]

Thanks for the insight

 

Do you set categories per page or per site?

 

Do you use machine learning etc? For text? Images?

[psydii]

..."I know it when I see it"...

 

These are all human problems, and are hard for humans to grapple with. Definitely not something that an AI is qualified to make decisions on.

 

(For what it's worth, we have a separate "Tate Brothers" category, because some schools want to block it, others want to monitor it and other's don't seem to care!).

 

This is definitely the right approach to the Tate Brothers. We fall towards the latter two, because we have a robust PSHE programme and encourage discussion of issues in safe manner.

 

On AI vs keywords filtering. The edge cases (but perhaps not quite as subjective as general Tate Brother's content) is exactly where the AI can do really well. Trained on the general set of categories, then refine it based on local opinion where local opinion disagrees with some of the classification... and it does really quite well. or so I am told by someone working with people who did the foundational work on this a decade ago.

 

..also Communication Compliance in Microsoft Purview seems to be built around this technology. I get alerts about non-compliant comms (probably keyword/phrase based) and on the dashboard it advise me the nature of the transgression - correctly identifying that two students discussing a set text that contained profanities as "neutral" while a chat where another two were "discussing" why one of them had kicked the other out of a discord server was identified as negative. Also, staff reporting on student transgressions (including the handwritten reports that contain the offending keywords / phrases) is were also given "neutral" sentiment, yet the initial transgression (that in part occurred in Teams) got picked up as negative.

 

Clever stuff.

[sigma]

I've made the case for blocking the Tate owned domains and fan sites, but leaving news and other discourse about them especially, in mainstream media unblocked. I would probably make a case for leaving the Tate domains unblocked but monitored for sixth-form if we had one.

 

We are reviewing the keyword list supplied by our ISP because its not KCSIE compliant as regards overblocking - in so many aspects. That will mean a greater reliance on categorisation. So far, I think it will be OK and probably better than where we are now. We tweak (allows as well as denies), a lot anyway because the interwebs are not static and neither are general sensitivities as to what is acceptable or not.

[Opendium_Steve]

Do you set categories per page or per site?

 

Both - the whole site can be in one or more categories (e.g. the whole of pornhub is in the porn category, the whole of reddit is a forum, etc.) but subsections of a site can also be categorised, so self-harmy bits of Reddit would be in the Self Harm category as well as the Forums category, the porny bits of Twitter would be in the Porn category as well as Social Networking, etc.

[mavhc]

In regards to overblocking, what do people think is the solution? A link to submit your request to be unblocked to your teacher/IT/filtering company? Probably send them up the chain to avoid being bombarded.

 

Maybe you get 1 unblock request per day or similar

[Opendium_Steve]

In regards to overblocking, what do people think is the solution? A link to submit your request to be unblocked to your teacher/IT/filtering company? Probably send them up the chain to avoid being bombarded.

 

Ofsted's The Safe Use of New Technologies report (2010) said:

Pupils in the schools that had ‘managed’ systems had better knowledge and understanding of how to stay safe than those in schools with ‘locked down’ systems. Pupils were more vulnerable overall when schools used locked down systems because they were not given enough opportunities to learn how to assess and manage risk for themselves

And recommended for schools to:

manage the transition from locked down systems to more managed systems to help pupils understand how to manage risk; to provide them with richer learning experiences; and to bridge the gap between systems at school and the more open systems outside school.

 

So the message seems to be less blocking, more monitoring. So consider turning down the sensitivity of content filters and compensating by using regular reports (and real-time alerts for serious stuff) to catch the content that now falls short of being blocked.

 

Our block pages have a button for users to report that the website has been miscategorised. Those reports go back to us as the filtering provider and are manually reviewed. There's plenty of useless noise in the reports, but there's also some really valuable stuff that is used to recategorise content. This doesn't cater for the situation where something has been categorised correctly but the user thinks that is should still be allowed, but in the future hopefully those reports can go directly to the school admins. How well that would work depends on how engaged the school are and how well resourced their staff are - filtering *policy* is a job for the schools rather than the suppliers, so a supplier can't make decisions on whether a correctly categorised site should be allowed anyway.

 

I'd be very interested to hear how schools are taking unblock requests from their users, and how they are being handled. The DfE's new guidance makes the point that decisions to block/unblock content need to be documented, which is something I rarely see happen (many a block list review ends with "why has the whole of Amazon AWS / Cloudflair / The Daily Mail been whitelisted?" -> "I dunno"). The guidance also says the DSL should be involved in allow/block decisions - it seems impractical for every decision to be run past the DSL at the time it is made, but having the DSL regularly review recent decisions would ensure some documentation was kept, since someone would need to explain the decisions!

[Roberto]

 

I'd be very interested to hear how schools are taking unblock requests from their users, and how they are being handled.

 

Been out of edu for a while now but when I was in, we used to use our service desk for these requests (along with everything else of course). It gave us a method to track requests in the moment as well as a way of reporting on them monthly and reviewing issues when debating changing our filtering platform.

[PotNoodleTech]

Ofsted's The Safe Use of New Technologies report (2010) said:

And recommended for schools to:

 

That's an interesting strategy. It's a bit like saying students do not get enough real world experience of learning how dangerous working on 240v/400v electric can be so instead of locking up all the electrical cupboards in the school safely, let's leave them all open and take the front covers off so that the student can have some real exposure and learn how dangerous they are for themselves. (few of them may get electrocuted but hey ho..as long as we have accurate reports of who got electrocuted and when, we should be covered right?).

[Zammo]

That's an interesting strategy. It's a bit like saying students do not get enough real world experience of learning how dangerous working on 240v/400v electric can be so instead of locking up all the electrical cupboards in the school safely, let's leave them all open and take the front covers off so that the student can have some real exposure and learn how dangerous they are for themselves. (few of them may get electrocuted but hey ho..as long as we have accurate reports of who got electrocuted and when, we should be covered right?).

 

 

I disagree.

 

Nobody is suggesting you deliberately leave obviously harmful content available and on display like your car battery example. But it's a well established principle in all facets of education that students will learn and develop better strategies and reasoning if you focus more energy on educating them and less on doomed-to-fail prevention strategies.

 

The KCSIE document which is the cornerstone of all our safeguarding efforts explicitly warns against over blocking.

[mavhc]

Does it define overblocking?

[Zammo]

Does it define overblocking?

 

No. As you well know.

[mavhc]

Typical useless government documents

[psydii]

Been out of edu for a while now but when I was in, we used to use our service desk for these requests (along with everything else of course). It gave us a method to track requests in the moment as well as a way of reporting on them monthly and reviewing issues when debating changing our filtering platform.

 

This is basically how I've always done it too. Requests come to the service desk. I have authority to make arbitrary changes. If a request would be potentially contentious, I ask the teacher to take it to the DSL for review - I could of course do that myself, but a better discussion is had if the teachers engage with senior management about filtering levels. The change is made in the platform and the ticket number recorded in the notes field. My line manager (who has always been either the DSL or the Head Teacher) reviews changes monthly(ish).

 

In the last 3 years there have been almost no changes to filtering from our side, despite the number of classes using IT in lessons rising by a third. The categories and keywords used by LGfL/WebScreen/Netsweeper seem to very well defined these days.

 

 

However, LGfL is about to make some major changes to the back end (under the rebrand to SchoolProtect), so we may well find that request go way up next year.

[Opendium_Steve]

That's an interesting strategy. It's a bit like saying students do not get enough real world experience of learning how dangerous working on 240v/400v electric can be so instead of locking up all the electrical cupboards in the school safely, let's leave them all open and take the front covers off so that the student can have some real exposure and learn how dangerous they are for themselves. (few of them may get electrocuted but hey ho..as long as we have accurate reports of who got electrocuted and when, we should be covered right?).

 

You may not agree with the outcome, but Ofsted did an actual study of real pupils at real schools, and their findings were that overdoing the filtering actually left kids more vulnerable.

 

I think the distinction between what Ofsted are saying and your suggestion is that kids will have to deal with unfiltered internet outside of school so it's important that they learn how to behave safely, whereas they don't routinely have to negotiate a world littered with open 400v cabinets. Even if the parents filter their home connection, at some point in their lives your pupils are going to encounter unfiltered internet, whereas I suspect most people go through their lives without ever being presented with live exposed electrics.

 

You're also reducing the risk of having lighter filtering by ramping up your monitoring - unlike electrocution, online dangers are generally not "one mistake and you're dead" - with proper monitoring you can catch concerning behaviour before it becomes serious.

 

I guess a lot of this comes down to what your goals are: if you want to keep pupils safe while they are in school and reduce the chances of the school being held liable for pupils seeing harmful content over the school's internet connection, then very strict filters are for you. If you want to keep pupils safe both in and out of school over their whole lives then Ofsted says reduced filtering and better monitoring and teaching are the right thing to do.

Does it define overblocking?

Sort of...

 

"be careful that “over blocking” does not lead to unreasonable restrictions as to what children can be taught with regard

to online teaching and safeguarding."

- KCSIE (England), Paragraph 134.

 

"It should not:  * unreasonably impact teaching and learning or school administration

* restrict students from learning how to assess and manage risk themselves"

- Filtering and Monitoring Standards (England)

 

"As far as possible, such tools should be accessible and free from restrictions that constrain their worthwhile educational value."

- DE Circular 2007/01 (Northern Ireland), Section 2

 

"appropriate internet access, is provided for boarders for the purposes of organised and private

study outside school hours and for social purposes."

- National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools (England), Paragraph 4.2

 

So multiple guidance documents from multiple UK governments define overblocking as whether the filters "unreasonably" restrict teaching and learning (and social activities at boarding schools). You can argue about what "unreasonably" means. Also consider that pupils are safer when using the school network, since you have filtering and monitoring - if you restrict things too much, they will simply go and use mobile data for all of their internet use, and then you've lost whatever ability you had to keep them safe. Sometimes you might accept that you're allowing access to unfilterable/unmonitorable parts of the internet in order to keep them on your network so that you can filter/monitor the rest of their traffic.

 

And obviously, there are requirements for schools to teach online safety, so the idea of being less strict with filtering shouldn't be taken in isolation, but rather supported by increased monitoring and education:

 

"Governing bodies and proprietors should ensure that children are taught about how to keep themselves and others safe, including online."

- KCSIE (England), Paragraph 129

 

"An effective online safety programme of education should supplement this guidance to teach children and young people the importance of responsible and considerate online behaviours."

- Education Digital Standards for Schools in Wales: Web Filtering, Paragraph 4

 

"Ensuring that all users are taught, and that they learn and exhibit, safe, responsible, ethical, moral, legal, healthy, intelligent and effective working practices, is an important educational goal which it is the responsibility of the school to promote, and for all staff to model, at all times."

- DE Circular 2007/01 (Northern Ireland), Section 2

 

"eSafety must be built into the delivery of the curriculum."

- DE Circular 2013/25 (Northern Ireland), Paragraph 2.5

 

"

* Pupils receive age-appropriate online safety messages that are relevant

and engaging.

* The school actively promotes online safety messages for pupils on how

to stay safe; how to protect themselves online; and how to take

responsibility for their own and others’ safety.

* Online safety is actively promoted within the school, for example through

the development of online safety messages by the learners themselves,

and participation in events such as Safer Internet Day and associated

competitions organised by agencies such as EA/C2k.

"

- DE Circular 2016/27 (Northern Ireland), Paragraph 9.

 

"Schools should deliver an age-related online safety curriculum to enable pupils to become safe and responsible users of technology."

- DE Circular 2016/27 (Northern Ireland), Paragraph 17.

[sigma]

We get few requests for changes. However,

 

If we see pupils signing up for sites where they break the T's&C's, we block it. (We are are small High School without a sixth form so it's manageable).

 

If I see something unambiguously unreasonably blocked from the previous day's reports - not unknown with our ISP's lists - I will consult and unblock otherwise we wait to be asked.

 

Anything that would normally fall into a category that we have blocked, or is a clone of something that our policy is to block, we just block. That is usually games and web proxies where (charitably) the filter hasn't caught up.

 

If we see something that is a safeguarding issue we will act first and then report as a safeguarding issue. An uncategorised (because there are new ones all the time), online video one to one chat with strangers for example.

 

Not everything that is filtered is concerned with safeguarding. We also have to maintain the integrity of our data, systems and networks and our filter, Impero and AV are also for this too, hopefully each where it is the most efficient.

[sigma]

This is exceptional because the iPad was unfiltered.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/11/surrey-teenager-who-took-her-own-life-was-not-safe-at-school-say-parents

[mavhc]

Can't they just give a list of example websites that they think are overblocked? Pay people per line of data not per word of vaugishness

[PotNoodleTech]

This is exceptional because the iPad was unfiltered.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/11/surrey-teenager-who-took-her-own-life-was-not-safe-at-school-say-parents

 

Was the content accessed on the ipad at school or at home though?

[Opendium_Steve]

This is exceptional because the iPad was unfiltered.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/11/surrey-teenager-who-took-her-own-life-was-not-safe-at-school-say-parents

 

 

I think Frankie's death directly lead to the new Filtering and Monitoring Standards:

 

Publishing some proper standards was definitely the right thing to do - previously schools were just told to do something "appropriate", and although the UK Safer Internet Centre's guidance was signposted by KCSiE, there was nothing from the government themselves. Schools had a lot of flexibility, but with no guidance from government it places a huge amount of work on the schools to figure it all out themselves. And frankly, most schools simply aren't capable of doing that (due to a combination of staff having not enough time and not enough knowledge).

 

The new guidance is a lot to take in, and for some schools is going to mean a lot of work (both policy and tech) to bring things up to the standards, but in the long run it's surely got to be the right thing to do. At the moment, England has by far the best guidance of the whole of the UK, and despite being a big supported of devolution myself, I think this is a circumstance where the devolved nations really should be pointing at the DfE guidance and saying "do that."

 

The inspectorate handbooks really need bringing up to standard too though: Ofsted's inspector's handbook just says:

"We do not require schools to: * take any specific steps with regard to site security; in particular, inspectors do not have a view about the need for perimeter fences or lockdown alarms * use a digital platform to monitor pupils’ internet use, and we do not specify how these platforms should operate"

 

Now, the guidance requires schools to have a monitoring strategy, but not necessarily a monitoring system, so its not wrong for Ofsted to say you're not required to have a monitoring system, but surely they should be checking that the risk assessments that you did to determine whether or not you need a monitoring system, and how you're using your monitoring system if you have one?

 

The Ofsted and Estyn handbooks both say they will inspect the way you teach online safety (the ISI's handbook doesn't say anything about online safety!), but surely they should also be looking at your filtering provision, etc. They do often look at the school's filtering, monitoring, etc. but the fact that these aren't mentioned in the inspector's handbook at all makes it all very hit and miss.

[Jawloms]

Was the content accessed on the ipad at school or at home though?

 

They said: “Frankie was not safe at school, despite inspections, and parents need to know that their child’s internet access at school has full protections in place.

 

That suggests at school.