sigma

For staff and students.

Exactly that. How would schools meet their filtering and monitoring KCSIE obligations if pupils have unfettered internet access through their phones’ data contracts or other personal devices? And please don’t say parental controls… Our pupils can bring their phones to school but they are confiscated if “seen” during the school day.

Does it make a difference as to which you set as the primary display?

When my parents passed the undertakers were kind, considerate and thoughtful. It was the marketing mailshot from the crematorium that raised my hackles. First tears then anger. Not for the cremations, but the side hustles on tacky and tasteless mementos that would have been at home on this thread.

I get your question, but it’s not entirely the same thing as I presume any school 1 to 1 devices will be locked into school filtering?

Still no functional Demand Reporting from School's Broadband's Netsweeper. Are we the only ones with this problem?

The Artificial Human on Radio 4 at 9am this morning was was interesting. It was about AI in the recruitment process. It's on BBC Sounds.

Twitter images are still whitelisted by Schools Broadband and since they now also whitelist Google image search thumbnails, there they are again now joined by all the other social media images and from everywhere else - even though they are category and url blocked..... along with all sorts of stuff that American Google safe search thinks if fine for American sensibilities, but for ours, less so. Weapons in particular.

All our Schools Broadband Netsweeper reports are broken and I'm fast heading that way myself.

Is anyone able to run any reports from the Netsweeper portal? For us existing reports sit "waiting" and new reports fail to start to run. As nobody has responded to the ticket I raised yesterday, I can't tell if their barely functioning new hub is actually presenting a ticket for a support person to look at or not....

I'll second that!

"Back in the day", I was rostered to respond a radiopager out of hours. I was paid for carrying it, paid more if I was called, and paid for any out of hours worked as a result - time x 1.25 for of hours during the week, time x 1.5 on a Saturday and time x 2 on a Sunday or Bank Holiday. This was in the late '80's before email and mobile phones were widely adopted and available at home, and home internet access was dial-up and slow, if available at all.

And/or this? https://customer.support-ess.com/sys_attachment.do?sys_id=53bd61fc1b107910455842a7b04bcb1b&view=true

Thanks Tom, that's really useful in clarifying our position for when we're checking logs and reports.

I agree. I was prompted by noting that working from home, the school's commercial VPN blocks some of these as "extreme" but our education Netsweeper doesn't, and would have expected it to be the other way round. IWF has a different mandate and focus. Not sure UKSIC know which way is up as long as they get good publicity. I just want to be be certain we are complying with all standards, mandatory guidance and legal requirements that we are supposed to be, and sensibly navigate what might be any ambiguity or grey areas.

I am somewhat aghast that our School's Broadband/Netsweeper configuration classifies: britainfirst.org - "Government" britishmovement.info - "journals and blogs" bnp.org.uk - "Government" english-defence-league.org - was "sales" until I reported it over the w/e and is now "hate speech" because of comments there. There are others I've not checked yet. Given that Netsweeper is now "accredited" by Saferinternet.org, I would have expected some sort of filtering of extremist content in line with the requirements of KCSIE, (but I will specifically avoid being political in suggesting that it's only a "certain type" of extremist content they might be validating...). Anyway, I'm interested in what other filters are managing, and other far-right (or left) sites we should be looking to block to fulfil our "blocking extremist content" KCSIE and Prevent obligations in lieu of effective automatic filtering. This is to block the sites but not the news reports about them.

As a school, we check everything that is flagged as "safeguarding" every day, so that appropriate action can be taken if necessary. It is very rare for us to find anything that is not a false positive, and mostly it is a "bad result" from a perfectly legitimate search because of poor filtering categorisation, and we record as such. In the event of a subject access request, we cannot have inaccurate records stored against pupil's names which would be the case if we relied on the automated filtering output directly. Our safeguarding alerts are 99.9% garbage, even after I've taken steps to mitigate as many FP's as possible. As a result of a high profile media case, it appears that "making" indecent images can have a wide legal definition. The Crown Prosecution Service says I am concerned that this wide ranging definition could be legally problematic for any staff checking filtering results in the event that any of the above conditions were met, possibly even for the filtering companies that supply the urls to us. Thoughts?

I agree, I can't find any requirement for search engine "keyword" blocking/monitoring in either Safeguarding or Prevent documentation. It seems to be a marketing feature. I also think it has little to no value in that capacity. It catches too many typo's, too much autocomplete (catches pupils typing arse but clicking on the autocomplete of "Arsenal"), catches &pq= when the previous query was blocked but the current search is fine, and with silly short words, they turn up in totally unrelated strings when badly specified (as per our filtering provider's list, and no longer used by us). The only genuinely useful words (we have others), are "unblocked" and "unbanned" (and variations of), which are searches used to deliberately bypass filtering, but only really act as a trip-wire to instigate a poke about in particular pupils activities. Having words such as "bomb" in a list, are counterproductive as any decent filter should be able to automatically allow relevant content such as relating to WW2 and block any illegal or inappropriate terrorist related content - without triggering Safeguarding alerts every time there’s a GCSE History class. As regards preparing children for what to do if they see inappropriate things, I find that Primary pupils will report to an adult, and then I get asked to investigate and respond accordingly, which has lately meant blocking yet another Ad Network that wasn't categorised correctly. For High School pupils, I rarely (never), ever get told, although activity patterns indicate "something" has been accessed as one pupil finds something and then they tell their mates. Maybe with single instances they are embarrassed to report them?

As regards keyword filtering ability, it depends on whether you rely on broadband filtering product alone or whether you have something such as Impero in place which gives a far more holistc view of "words" on a screen. A school would need to be very clear if/why it was not meeting the published "standard" as it coud lead to difficuties is complying with KCSIE and Prevent mandatory guidance. This standard is published as guidance: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges/filtering-and-monitoring-standards-for-schools-and-colleges With all the different filters I have ever used, I still find the "unknown unknowns", by way of identifying content that has been accessed that shouldn't have been "challenging".

I imagine that crowdstrike will need a swift rebranding.

https://bhawkins3.substack.com/p/covid-situation-report-jul-18-2024

Header modification for forcing "Safe search" on duckduckgo search engine where there's no Group Policy support, and for redirecting search engines back to Google (or Bing), where's there's no Safe Search option to enforce, which is more useful than blocking. /*enddigress

So, for Corbett Maths for example in a Local List for the Policy Group (pupils), so that it overrides Shared List and category entries: Entry: corbettmaths.com Entry Type: URL Request Part: Referrer Header Action: Allow. Depending on how you have blocked YouTube, you may need to fiddle and diddle a bit with some of the "youtube framework" urls, but you should be fine. This allows videos just from Corbett Maths to play, and pupils are blocked if they try to play anything else. Same for sites using Vimeo. The Netsweeper online manual is pretty good with information, but sometimes takes a bit of getting used to to find what you are looking to do.

We allow embedded YouTube or Vimeo on certain maths and IT sites via referrer header, and endeavour to allow whenever its asked for by staff for pupils. It’s otherwise blocked. Why did you switch?

In my experience, village halls will have furniture and refreshments facilities, but not the consumables. You may find getting storage space for the kit more of a challenge. Find out what the condition of hire are for halls and whether you would be covered by their insurance or not. I think it’s a good idea. Things can always and will always go wrong. You’ll never know if it would work for your intended audience unless you try it.