STAFF at Holy Trinity Primary School are celebrating after winning a prestigious award for their work helping children with online safety.
Winning the award in Pastoral Development of the Year from the National Association of Pastoral Care in Education (NAPCE), Holy Trinity faced stiff competition from hundreds of schools across England, Scotland and Wales.
Headmaster Fiona Boyd said Holy Trinity PS recognise that their pupils are living in a digital world and as well as learning how to navigate the digital world in order to learn, emphasis must almost be put on how to stay safe online.
Ms Boyd said: "Over the last two years we have become increasingly concerned about the number of children having access to devices such as iPads, phones and games consoles unsupervised.
"We conducted a survey on P3-P7 children and we were alarmed at the amount of children who had unsupervised access, had social media accounts such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and were online talking with both friends and strangers.
"We found a number had reported self-harming as a result of social media and cyber bullying and some were becoming increasingly isolated due to the impact of their time spent online.
"To fix this we came up with the idea of ESafetySaurus, our eSafety mascot who attends many events in our school and we devised specialist months with each month tackling a specific eSafety topic from Protect Your Password in September to months dedicated to 'Beware What You Share', 'Stranger Danger and Gaming', 'Blast Off to Cyber Bullying' and 'Be Kind Online'."
ONLINE: eSafetySaurus has been helping pupils such as Maisie Smith and Harry McArdle of Holy Trinity PS learn about online safety
Ms Boyd also said students were given advice on making online purchases and the risk of buying any gaming add-ons without permission.
The results of this have been immediate with a reported significant drop in cyber bullying, reporting of strangers who have made contact online, and children joining school clubs and spending less time online and taking greater care as to what they post online.
After winning the award, the school was praised for its forward thinking approach and was presented with the award at a ceremony in Birmingham.
Fiona Boyd said of the award: "We are absolutely delighted to receive this prestigious award in recognition of the outstanding pastoral care within our school in relation to eSafety.
"We are preparing our children to be digital citizens of the future and want to ensure they know how to protect themselves in an ever changing digital world."
