Recommendation 20

HM Government Acknowledged

75. The Government agrees that pupils need to be taught about online harms and supported to develop resilience as part of schools’ role in supporting all children and young people grow up happy, healthy and safe. That is why, in September 2020, we made statutory in all schools a Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) curriculum in which pupils are taught about online relationships, mental wellbeing, internet safety and harms, and online and media. 76. To support teachers to deliver this content effectively we have invested over £3m in a support package for teachers which includes online teacher training modules, guidance on how to implement the curriculum and training for teachers. Because of the importance of teaching about online harms, in 2019 the DfE published specific Teaching Online Safety in Schools guidance. This non-statutory guidance aims to support schools in teaching pupils how to stay safe online within new and existing school subjects, such as RSHE, Citizenship and Computing. DfE is reviewing this guidance with a view to ensuring it remains up to date. The revised guidance will be published in autumn 2022. 77. We are also developing an additional support package following the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges which was published in June 2021. This will cover topics relevant to online harms and resilience, and we have already delivered a series of teacher webinars on domestic abuse, pornography and sexual exploitation which can be viewed on the Personal Social Health and Economic (PSHE) education Association’s website: Department for Education Sexual Harassment webinars and the development of non-statutory guidance which will provide practical advice to teachers on when and how to teach particular topics. 78. In addition to the above, the Department for Education is providing over £2m of funding, between August 2021 and March 2023, to five anti-bullying organisations to support schools to tackle bullying. The organisations are delivering tailored resources that meet the needs of students and school staff, including training and resources developed to tackle online bullying, for example the Anti-Bullying Alliance have developed a CPD module aimed specifically at online bullying. 79. The Government has now introduced the Online Safety Bill to Parliament, the Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons on 19 April 2022. This ground breaking piece of legislation will deliver our manifesto commitment of making the UK the safest place in the world to be online. For the first time tech companies are going to be accountable to an independent regulator to keep their users, particularly children, safe with the strongest protections in this framework for children. 80. All companies in scope of the legislation will need to assess whether their service is likely to be accessed by children and if so, deliver additional protections for them. Those safety measures will need to protect children from inappropriate and harmful content like pornography, and behaviour such as bullying. Government will set out in secondary legislation the priority categories of harmful material to children, so that all companies are clear on what they need to protect children from. Ofcom will then set out the steps companies can take to protect children from harm on their service. 81. Alongside the Online Safety Framework Government has published the Online Media Literacy Strategy which is a non-legislative measure to support citizens, including children, to make safe and informed choices online. Through this we have already provided over £250k grant funding to media literacy organizations working with schools to adapt their educational resources for teachers working with children with special educational needs and disabilities. We recently published the Year 2 Online Media Literacy Action Plan which sets out our ambitious work programme to continue supporting citizens to stay safe online.