Overview

Robertsbridge Community College purchased Digital Safety Monitoring Plus from Schools ICT in early 2021. The previous monitoring system’s manual data analysis burdened both the safeguarding team with lengthy interpretation and the IT team with constant maintenance, hindering timely responses to potential safety issues.

In contrast the real-time, human-moderated monitoring and advanced behavioural analysis capabilities of Digital Safety Monitoring Plus has been instrumental in the safeguarding team’s success in protecting students over the past three years.

Challenges

Schools ICT’s partnership with Smoothwall proved invaluable during software implementation. Their training was thorough and detailed and readily available expertise is ongoing including regular feature update bulletins.

The ‘install and go’ nature of the new client software was a breath of fresh air for the IT team. No complex configurations, just a quick deployment across all devices.

Results

Digital Safety Monitoring Plus is based on a monitoring software tool provided by Smoothwall. It alerts designated school staff to students suspected of becoming vulnerable based on their digital behaviours.

Emma Massey, DSL at Robertsbridge said;

“The software gives me a deeper understanding and insight into safeguarding across the whole school. It makes identifying trends and highlighting potential issues easy. It allows us to have early conversations with students and initiate follow up education and support if required.

We have been contacted by the moderator team on several occasions including one where imminent risk to life was reported which was a complete surprise to our team. In all cases the initial flag by the software prompted the creation of wider support plans.”