Digital toolkit helps young children grasp the building blocks of online safety

• Contains hundreds of resources for practitioners working with children from early years to teenagers

• Evidence shows pre-school children understand safety online at a time when many own a mobile device

ACTION

The latest report by Ofcom into media literacy among families includes for the first time a specific section for the under-fives detailing how very young children engage with different types of media.

Two years ago, the communications regulator reported that 20 per cent of children under the age of five in the UK owned their own mobile device. Its most recent investigation shows this has risen to half of all children aged three and four.

Not only do these children have access to a device, but they actually own their own tablet, the report says. In addition, four per cent of these children have been given their own smartphone, it adds.

The same study highlights a shift in preference among young children to video on demand over live television.

More than 90 per cent routinely use video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok to watch content such as cartoons, it explains.

With the Covid-19 pandemic sending increasing numbers of children online for both leisure and educational purposes, the need to safeguard how and what they access has never seemed more important.

“We’ve seen a shift in the landscape to this particularly unique demographic – there’s not been a group like them,” says Ken Corish, online safety director for South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL), a not-for-profit charity that promotes the safe use of technology through its online services.

Corish says this shift has meant a change in response that takes into account the needs of very young children, particularly given the “paucity of resource” around early years.

“We carry with us the legacy borne from the last 10 to 15 years of online safety interventions that tended to be focused on teens and the issues they were facing,” he explains.

“Many of those interventions were reactive and attempted to address the issues through awareness raising and education intervention.”

Corish says as technology has become more embedded in everyday life, advice aimed at young people is not sophisticated enough to shape positive behaviour.

“Any effective education programme needs to be progressive and build on prior knowledge, which means that the fundamental concepts of many of the complex ecosystems children and young people find themselves in need to be established early,” he says. This means providing more than just “be-safe style messages”.

Initiatives such as SWGfL’s Project Evolve use focused resources that, according to Corish, establish “important building blocks” from an early age. The free-to-use digital toolkit, suitable for children up to the age of 18, covers a range of issues for young people including self-image, consent, forming positive relationships and ownership.

Launched around 18 months ago and funded most recently by SWGfL’s partner Nominet, it has attracted 8,500 organisations with more than 30,000 users.

While there are numerous online safety resources available, Corish believes the landscape can appear “crowded” for schools and early years settings deciding what option would suit them best.

Project Evolve, which is based on the Education for a Connected World (ECW) framework developed by SWGfL with the UK Council for Internet Safety and other safeguarding organisations, has a clear innovative advantage, he explains.

The ECW framework breaks down young people’s experiences into eight strands that encompass every aspect of children’s online life. These include issues such as self-image and identity in addition to technology and privacy, says Corish.

The toolkit matches more than 600 resources to the 360-plus competencies within the framework.

“It is the knowledge map tool that allows you to navigate that huge bank of resources based on children’s needs and not a fixed curriculum that is its real innovative advantage,” says Corish.

“As far as we know, there is no other toolkit providing this functionality and was an essential element for us.

“We wanted schools to know what children needed to know and whether the interventions they were applying were making any difference.”

Once a school or early years setting has registered for Project Evolve, they can search for resources, accompanied by relevant activities, based on year groups, or theme or subject specialism.

Corish says knowledge maps are easy to create for users and help with choosing resources.

This in turn reduces workload by building customised lessons and then allows for detailed analysis on impact and progression.

“They are built from the ground up to be accessible and easy to use,” he explains.

In terms of assessing to what extent children have grasped knowledge about online safety, Corish says the knowledge map tool is starting to provide “unique and valuable insight” into how this particular demographic understands the online world they inhabit.

He says: “Some of the emerging trends are quite surprising. For example, early years has made significant progress within the copyright and ownership strand of the competencies.

“This is not so surprising when you consider that the framework statements for that age group in that strand discussed ways in which you can make sure you label your work as yours, and that if you are accessing somebody’s else’s work that is labelled with their name you should ask permission.

“This is a perfect example of establishing the fundamental concepts of copyright, something that many adults still struggle with.”

IMPACT

Feedback from users of Project Evolve has been “overwhelmingly” positive, with many schools already incorporating its resources into their wider digital literacy curriculum, says Corish.

“The only negative feedback is that it’s too big and there isn’t enough time to fit into an already crowded curriculum,” he adds. “To this end, we have already begun to assist different subject specialists with curriculum pathways through the tool to help with curriculum planning.”

Corish explains the toolkit has been specifically designed to ensure that its evaluation metrics are central to its own developmental journey.

“We not only measure engagement, but also what children know, what they are secure in and where they have misconceptions.

“We can even identify gaps in knowledge and incorrect understanding of concepts,” he adds.

SWGfL has published an analysis of data collected from its Project Evolve database, the first of its kind to draw on use of the platform by more than 6,600 educational establishments, incorporating more than 24,000 individual users.

It found aspects of the tool were viewed more than 250,000 times by users, with some schools viewing resources more than 500 times.

Around 83,000 knowledge maps were used to assess student knowledge in the classroom and to support their knowledge development.

Other key findings revealed the vast majority of activity around online safety education using the platform was in Key Stage 2 and dropped off considerably in secondary education.

“There is a challenge in the sector to consider how online safety education can be made to work in secondary settings, and how to motivate senior managers to consider its importance,” the report states.

Furthermore, it highlights that for those in secondary settings making use of knowledge maps, their knowledge was generally better.

“However, we also know that those more complex issues, and those that might relate to risk mitigation when tackling online harms are not used well across the platform,” it adds.

Among the most popular aspects and use of knowledge maps was online relationships and identity.

“This illustrates the importance of recognising online issues as something that arises as part of peer-to-peer interactions, and harm reduction cannot be readily addressed with automated tools and platform takedowns,” the report concludes.

Read more in CYP Now's Digital Solutions special report