Safeguarding risks are increasingly appearing in students’ online activities. Without visibility of digital spaces, DSLs will struggle to spot vulnerable students in time - or even at all. Helen McKay, DSL at St Mary’s Catholic High School, describes her experience of using digital monitoring to overcome this, and reveals how it has changed her approach to safeguarding.
The following insights are excerpts from a recent Smoothwall webinar. You can find a link to watch the full session at the end of the article.
DSLs with a number of years’ experience will be keenly aware that the demands of the role have significantly evolved. For Helen, one big shift in particular has changed the way she has to work:
“When I started this role 6 years ago, a lot of what I did was physical risk, whereas a majority of safeguarding concerns we deal with - whether it is mental health and wellbeing, whether it’s bullying - have an online connection now.”
The Department for Education (DfE) requires DSLs to identify and respond to safeguarding risks as early as possible. But as Helen explains, these risks are now appearing in online spaces - so how can safeguarders see them if they’re not evident in the classrooms and corridors they monitor?
For Helen, digital monitoring has been essential to bridge this visibility gap.
To ensure compliance, schools and colleges must have filtering and monitoring in place. Filtering prevents students accessing harmful websites, whereas monitoring goes much deeper - identifying risks in what students do, say and share across digital spaces.
While filtering establishes an important safeguarding foundation, Helen finds that monitoring is much for valuable for DSLs in particular:
“Filtering is kind of your policies, your technical nuts and bolts. [Monitoring] is where as a DSL you can really get into the detail (...) You can see exactly what individuals are typing online and offline. It's the proactive angle.
I think it gives you a really robust layer of protection and reassurance that you don't have [with filtering].”
With digital monitoring in place, Helen and her team can identify risks much earlier, and this makes a real difference to her role:
“Being able to pick up on those very early seeds really has been transformative for us and our safeguarding approach.
The impact has been massive with the early identification of vulnerable pupils. That's where, as a DSL, that is your motivation - to keep everybody safe. It is about making that difference to a young person who really needs your help and being able to do that as quickly and effectively as possible.
We've not had to wait, for example, for a significant incident to occur before we've been able to start having those conversations.”
Not only does early risk detection support more effective interventions, but it also protects DSL time and resources. As Helen explains:
“I think you probably save on workload because you're picking things up sooner, [and are] able to intervene more quickly to prevent escalation, which as we all know is where the big demands on our time come from with referrals, phone calls, multi-agency meetings, and so forth.”
Monitoring alerts from systems like Smoothwall Monitor are delivered with context in the form of screenshots. For Helen, these insights are vital pieces of the safeguarding puzzle - helping her to make confident, informed decisions on next steps to take:
“I can't tell you enough how reassuring it really is. Having that level of evidence is really, really useful.
You can build up patterns of behaviour if you've got a user who is flagged to you a number of times, or even if it's the first time, you can cross-reference that young person with your existing safeguarding chronologies to see if there's a need to be concerned.”
From early warning signs to major red flags, the information provided by digital monitoring solutions gives DSLs significant visibility of the safeguarding issues and trends developing across their setting.
Some digital monitoring systems will categorise alerts according to risk level, and use this information to inform how notifications are delivered. For alerts that indicate a risk to health or life, Smoothwall Monitor will prompt a direct phone call to the DSL, so they can act as quickly as possible.
Helen describes her first-hand experience of receiving a high level alert, and the life-saving impact it had for one student:
“I had an incident - and as always it was a Friday afternoon - where I got a high level notification saying that I had a sixth form pupil who had a suicide plan.
The name didn't immediately ring alarm bells. There was no safeguarding history here at all.
It turned out that this young person had suffered with low mood for many years and hadn't shared it with anybody at school or at home. She had a very clear plan of taking her life that weekend.
I was able to do a referral and safeguard that child within hours of what she put into the system. There is no way we would have known that without Monitor.”
As many young people now turn to digital spaces as an outlet for their mental health struggles, a DSL’s ability to see risks developing in emails, Word documents and private chats, in some cases, can make a life-saving difference.
The monitoring system used by St Mary’s is human-moderated, meaning alerts are reviewed by trained moderators before they are sent to the school. For Helen, this is a vital feature:
“It’s really invaluable, because you’ve got that reassurance that concerns are being identified and appropriately filtered and assessed by a human, not just by a technical system.
I think if you didn't have the human moderation there'd be a real risk of you'd just be flooded - and then where do you start?”
Human moderators can remove false positives to prevent DSL time being wasted on false alarms, and ensure that alerts are categorised and delivered appropriately. This is not the case with unmoderated monitoring systems, where weeding out false positives and prioritising alerts according to risk level becomes another task for the DSL.
“I couldn't be without this system now. It's been in place for over 3 years and there's nothing that could replicate it as far as I'm concerned, because I don't believe you can do it as effectively as this in-house.
We want to feel, when we go home, we've done everything within our power to keep our children safe. And our parents and carers want to know that's what we've done. If I didn't have this I'd feel there was a gap - and I don't want to ever feel that I've got gaps.
It’s worth every penny for the peace of mind and the extra minutes of sleep you might get in your role as a DSL.”