The Northumberland Online Safety Audit is available to all schools in ICT SLA3. It is designed to take settings through six key areas of online safety in order to identify areas of strength and areas for future development.
It is aligned with the most recent updates to Keeping Children Safe in Education 2023 and the associated Filtering and Monitoring guidance.
We suggest that you use this tool to carry out a scheduled formal review annually, but encourage you to use the notes and actions field as a living document to reflect updates and changes as they occur throughout the year.
This is a detailed and thorough audit of the many facets of your online safety provision. We recommend tackling one category at a time, considering which members of your online safety group should be involved in the audit of each category, with your lead DSL having overall responsibility for the audit's completion.
In the following years, you'll simply open the auditing tool and find that the fields are all pre-filled with the information you added in year one, you can then tweak the text to reflect the actions you have carried out since the last audit.
Finally, this audit is designed to show progression over a period of time. Initially, many actions may be identified. We advise prioritising some of these for the term ahead, breaking down larger tasks into smaller actionable points and identifying the parties responsible for these tasks. Come back to the audit and add to the actions field to create a record of your steps toward completion.
The intention here is that you are able to demonstrate an awareness of what you're already doing well, and what could be improved, you can point out clearly the steps you are taking to make improvements over time.
If your setting does not have access to the audit yet, please complete the following form. If you have already completed the form to access the online safety site and checked the box for the audit, you don't need to do this again.