Can schools ever truly keep up with online filtering and monitoring? Gary Sanderson explores the complex balance between online safety, privacy and the evolving role of schools in digital monitoring and education
Filtering and monitoring of student online activity is very important. One look online at some of the distasteful, distressing and even harmful content confirms this. Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE) refers directly to the need for online safety plus references the DfE’s digital standards in relation to filtering and monitoring, where further information is provided. It is all very clear, however the real world isn’t that simple and with privacy and security two key tenets of the online and digital world we live in it is increasingly necessary to take a more pragmatic approach rather than to seek to achieve impossible compliance.
Privacy Technology
I remember recently reading an article regarding a country seeking to block content, blocking a whole social media service, in order to prevent inappropriate content. The article goes on to state that the service is inaccessible “without the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN)”. Sadly, with VPNs being advertised and freely available this doesn’t sound like much of a limitation. So, if a country cannot block a whole service, how can a school hope to successfully block individual content across many different services?
The issue here is the importance of privacy to digital tools. Would we purchase items online if our details weren’t secure or would we share photos with friends if anyone could access them. Also, whistleblowers and activists, without secure data their very lives may be at risk. And so, technology has privacy and security baked in, plus we see the creation of privacy and security technologies such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), cloud based clients which can be deleted when finished with, the tor network and more. And these tools are more easily accessible and usable than at any point in history, often being a simple download or single click rather than something which requires much in the way of technical skills.
To further complicate things for schools, we also need to acknowledge that children will actively seek to test boundaries, and in doing so often come up with creative solutions to bypass filtering. This might be using AI tools as a proxy or to create new inappropriate content. Students also, often have an internet connected smart device in their phone, where its 4G or 5G connection is outside a school’s efforts to filter and monitor.
Time to Change the Narrative?
Schools continue to do all they reasonably can in filtering and monitoring with increasing requirements applied almost every year through KCSiE and the filtering and monitoring standards. But are we now at a point of diminishing returns on our efforts? And if so, should we maybe not be focussing our efforts elsewhere? My view is that the answer to this is yes, we should be focussing our efforts elsewhere. Yes, we should continue to filter and monitor as best we can, but equally we should be shifting our efforts to education and to speaking with students, parents and the wider school community as to online risks be these related to cybercrime, to big data, to algorithmic influence, to fake news or to other risks. Our focus should be on digital citizenship education!
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