Information for Parents

Technology and the Internet can be fantastic – they can help our children to learn, to create amazing things, to communicate and to entertain themselves and each other. Our children are surrounded by this technology – it is part and parcel of their daily lives.

Using technology and the Internet well is about using it safely and responsibly. Things can go wrong by accident or if behaviour isn’t sensible or respectful.  Our job is not to stop our young people from using technology but to ensure that they have the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to successfully navigate themselves through the online world, so they become good digital citizens.

​Please click here to view information about the MOMO challenge.

Safer Internet Day 2022

Each year, as a school community, we celebrate Safer Internet Day and take part in discussions and activities based around internet safety. It is very important to us at St Mary’s that our pupils are safe navigating the online world – particularly now there has been a sharp increase of children using devices at home, after their time learning from home during our recent lockdowns.

This year, the theme for Safer Internet Day was ‘All fun and games? Exploring respect and relationships online’. The organisation who created Safer Internet Day (UK Safer Internet Centre) wanted a focus on strengthening the emotional wellbeing of pupils, encouraging the use of technology to connect with friends and helping children to create an enjoyable, friendly environment in their online world.

With the pupils, we drew on knowledge of our British Value of ‘Mutual Respect’ and our work from ‘Children’s Mental Week’ to support us on Safer Internet Day. We had discussions and participated in activities throughout the day to help us reflect on how our own actions and choices online can affect others and what we can do to make sure that being online is fun for everyone.

We explored this through virtual workshops, filled with games, role play activities and quizzes. We found out lots of information such as how much our time spent online can affect us, attempted to guess how many users we think Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok have and we were also able to share our own thoughts and ideas during the activities.

To show what we had learnt on Safer Internet Day, the pupils produced pieces of work based on how to be kind to others online, how to stop negative behaviour by others online and explained how our digital footprint (the evidence left behind for others to see when we do something online) could damage our reputation. We had lots of fantastic and informative designs and it is clear the pupils worked very hard on these.

eSafety Useful Links

The links on this page are designed to support you in helping your children stay as safe as they can be when using technology, including the Internet.

Click on the icons to access useful links