Staying Safe Online

How can developing our media literacy support our well-being, our relationships and our democracy?

• What are the risks and benefits of the online world? 
• What does it mean to stay safe online?

• Students will be able to identify the risks and benefits of the online world.
• Students will be able to explain different ways they can stay safe while online.

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-min class period and includes the following student materials:

• 1 PowerPoint

The Internet is an important part of most young people’s lives; learning how to navigate the Internet and technology in a safe, considered and respectful way is therefore essential. This can improve well-being, can help individuals nurture and develop healthy relationships with themselves and others, and can ensure young people do not fall prey to the many risks associated with being online. 

Statutory safeguarding requirements across all four nations of the UK emphasise the need to help children understand what type of online material or behaviour is considered harmful and/or inappropriate as well as how to minimise the risks and danger of such exposure. 

In Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023 (guidance issued to schools in England), the Department for Education highlights four key areas of risk online:

Content: being exposed to illegal, inappropriate, or harmful content, for example: pornography, fake news, racism, misogyny, self-harm, suicide, anti-Semitism, radicalisation, and extremism. 

Contact: being subjected to harmful online interaction with other users; for example: peer-to-peer pressure, commercial advertising and adults posing as children or young adults with the intention to groom or exploit them for sexual, criminal, financial or other purposes. 

Conduct: online behaviour that increases the likelihood of, or causes, harm; for example, making, sending and receiving explicit images (e.g. consensual and non-consensual sharing of nudes and semi-nudes and/or pornography, sharing other explicit images and online bullying).

Commerce: risks such as online gambling, inappropriate advertising, phishing and or financial scams. ¹

While safeguarding guidance makes clear the role schools play in helping young people understand the challenges associated with media literacy, the question remains: Who else is responsible for the safety of children online? 

The Online Safety Act 2023 has recently passed into law and aims to answer this question by putting the onus of online safety for children on tech companies.

The Act expects tech companies such as Apple, Meta, and even Wikipedia to:

• Remove illegal content quickly or prevent it from appearing in the first place, including content promoting self-harm
• Prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content, including pornographic content; content that promotes, encourages or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders; content depicting or encouraging serious violence; or bullying content
• Enforce age limits and use age-checking measures on platforms where content harmful to children is published
• Ensure social media platforms are more transparent about the risks and dangers posed to children on their sites, including by publishing risk assessments
• Provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise. ²

The Online Safety Act 2023 has been supported by charities like the NSPCC and safety group the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). It has also been supported by bereaved parents who say harmful online content contributed to their child’s death, including the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell who died from an act of self-harm while suffering depression and the negative effects of online content. ³

However, critics of the Act argue that the Online Safety Act 2023 curtails freedom of speech and infringes on privacy. It also raises questions about the extent to which the government or any platform should be able to monitor user content.

• 1Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023: Statutory Guidance for Schools and Colleges, 1 September 2023, Department for Education.
• 2‘UK children and adults to be safer online as world-leading bill becomes law’, GOV.UK press release, 26 October 2023 (accessed 20 January 2024).
• 3‘Molly Russell inquest: Father makes social media plea’, BBC News, 30 September 2022 (accessed 20 January 2024).

Each lesson in this unit includes a PowerPoint of student-facing slides. The PowerPoints are intended to be used alongside, and not instead of, the lesson plans because the latter include important rationales and context that teachers should familiarise themselves with before teaching each lesson. The PowerPoints include basic content and student-facing prompts from the lesson plans but are minimally designed because we expect teachers to adapt them to fit the needs of their students and class.

Help students learn about the Online Safety Act 2023, which has recently become law, and the impact that it will have on their life online. 

To begin, share the statement ‘Tech companies should be held responsible for keeping people safe online’ with students and invite them to express how far they agree with it using the Barometer teaching strategy. 

Then, give students more information about the Act. Explain that the Act aims to make the online experiences of children safer by forcing tech firms to take more responsibility for the content on their platforms.  Share the following information: 

The Online Safety Act 2023 expects tech companies to do the following things:

• Remove illegal content quickly or prevent it from appearing in the first place, including content promoting self-harm
• Prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content including pornographic content; content that promotes, encourages or provides instructions for suicide, self-harm or eating disorders; content depicting or encouraging serious violence; or bullying content
• Enforce age limits and use age-checking measures on platforms where content harmful to children is published
• Ensure social media platforms are more transparent about the risks and dangers posed to children on their sites, including by publishing risk assessments
• Provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise.

Once students have reviewed the information about the Online Safety Act 2023, invite them to consider the following questions independently before inviting some students to share their responses with the class:

1. Should tech companies be responsible for the online safety experiences of children? Why? Or, why not?
2. What challenges might the Online Safety Act 2023 face from tech companies and individuals using their services? 
3. Is it possible to enforce how people use the Internet? 
4. Should the government attempt to regulate the Internet? 
5. Some critics of the Online Safety Act 2023 have argued that it will violate privacy. How might the right to privacy be affected by the Online Safety Act 2023?
6. How do you feel about the aims of the Online Safety Act 2023? Explain why you feel the way you do.

Divide the class into small groups and give each group one of the following topics related to online safety (given class size, you may have several groups engaging with each topic):

• Privacy
  • Passwords, location services, oversharing, account settings, strangers.
• Mental and Emotional Well-being
  • Levels of Internet consumption, offensive and/or triggering content, app age restrictions, cyberbullying, conspiracy theories.
• Harmful Behaviours
  • Cyberbullying, hate speech, spreading misinformation, disinformation and mal-information, posting on social media.
• Fraud and Deception
  • Identity theft, catfishing, phishing, scams, anonymity, fake websites, fake profiles, strangers. 

Ask students to do further research on their given topic, and to respond to the following questions: 

For your given topic, consider: 

1. How is this topic relevant to the online world and technology?
   • Why is it important to consider this topic? 
2. What are risks related to this topic? Consider online/offline impacts.
3. What steps can be taken to safeguard against any potential negative outcomes related to this topic?  

Once students have finished researching and discussing their topic, ask each group to present their findings to the class or to create a poster sharing key information that you can display on a wall in the classroom and/or that students can review using the Gallery Walk teaching activity. You might then ask each student to create a found poem or an acrostic for a phrase such as ‘ONLINE SAFETY’ with the information they have learnt.