Staff and pupils at a primary school in west Belfast have been celebrating scooping a prestigious award for their work helping children with online safety.
Holy Trinity PS faced very stiff competition from hundreds of schools across England, Scotland and Wales to win the award in Pastoral Development of the Year from the National Association of Pastoral Care in Education (NAPCE), a national organisation which recognises outstanding pastoral care in education.
After winning the award, the school was praised for its forward thinking approach and recently presented with the award at a ceremony in Birmingham.
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Fiona Boyd, head teacher of Holy Trinity PS, told Belfast Live: “We are absolutely delighted to have received the national Pastoral Care Development of the Year award from NAPCE (National Association Pastoral Care in Education) in recognition of our innovative ESafety programme.
“Through this programme we not only give the children the knowledge and skills to become digital citizens of the future, we also teach them how to stay safe in this ever changing digital world.
“Holy Trinity is more than just a school, it is a community, a family. It’s a safe haven where the educational, physical and emotional health and well being of every single person is paramount.
“The staff are committed, dedicated, caring, compassionate and professional, providing the highest level of pastoral care in a safe, nurturing, and inclusive environment.
“We realise that our children live in a digital world and we need to ensure that they have the digital knowledge and skills to become lifelong learners but also they need to know how to stay safe and guard their digital footprint.
“ICT and technologies are continually changing and in Holy Trinity we strive to give the pupils the skills needed to prepare them for a future where ICT will play a major part. We want everyone to be confident, competent independent users of ICT.”
Ms Boyd added: “Over the last two years we have become increasingly concerned about the number of children having access to devices such as iPads, phones and games consoles unsupervised.
“We conducted a survey on P3-P7 children and we were alarmed at the amount of children who had unsupervised access, had social media accounts such as Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and were online talking with both friends and strangers.
“We found a number had reported self-harming as a result of social media and cyber bullying and some were becoming increasingly isolated due to the impact of their time spent online.
“To fix this we came up with the idea of ESafetySaurus, our eSafety mascot who attends many events in our school and we devised specialist months with each month tackling a specific eSafety topic from Protect Your Password in September to months dedicated to ‘Beware What You Share’, ‘Stranger Danger and Gaming’, ‘Blast Off to Cyber Bullying’ and ‘Be Kind Online’.”
Ms Boyd also said students were given advice on making online purchases and the risk of buying any gaming add-ons without permission.
The results of this have been immediate with a reported significant drop in cyber bullying, reporting of strangers who have made contact online, and children joining school clubs and spending less time online and taking greater care as to what they post online.
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