Last week, a 16-year-old was found guilty of the attempted murder of a 15-year-old girl at a school near Norwich. The court heard he had an "obsessive and dangerous interest in killers and killing" and had written about his hatred of women. His parents said that he had been "corrupted" by violent online content, served up by algorithms, and that they had no idea what he was viewing.
No school can control everything a child sees on a phone at home. But the case is a sharp reminder that filtering and monitoring are not just IT settings. They are safeguarding tools, and often the first place a worrying pattern shows up.
What KCSIE and the DfE standards expect
Keeping Children Safe in Education requires governing bodies and proprietors to ensure appropriate filtering and monitoring systems are in place. KCSIE 2026 tightens this by stating that effectiveness must now be reviewed at least once every academic year. This is alongside regular checks that the filtering is working as intended.
The DfE's filtering and monitoring standards set out what "appropriate" means. Schools should assign clear roles, review provision annually, block harmful and inappropriate content without unreasonably restricting learning, and have effective monitoring strategies that meet their safeguarding needs. The DSL holds lead responsibility for online safety, including understanding what monitoring reports are telling them.
Practical steps for this term
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Name your people. Confirm who on SLT owns filtering and monitoring, which governor oversees it, and how the DSL and IT provider share the work. Write it into your policy.
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Book the annual review. Put a date in the calendar now and keep a record of what was checked, what was found and what changed. Our Online Safety Audit template provides a framework for this.
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Test your filter. Use our free template to check that your filtering works as expected for different users on all machines (including those that go off-site). Are there any limitations to your filtering (e.g. BYOD, iPads and AI-generated content), and if so, assess the risk of these.
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Look beyond blocked sites. Much of the content in this case was mainstream entertainment. Monitoring should flag patterns in searches and typing, such as repeated interest in killers or hate towards a group, not just hits on a block list. Having HTTPS decryption enabled is essential for this.
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Make sure alerts reach a human quickly. Agree who reads monitoring reports, how often, and how concerns are logged and escalated. Include this in your policy. An alert nobody reads protects no one. Responding to data from your filtering and monitoring should help both your reactive safeguarding response but also proactively, whereby the school is spotting gaps and trends to inform the curriculum and other elements of the whole school approach.
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Train staff. Everyone should know what filtering and monitoring can and cannot do, and that they still need to report what they see and hear, no matter how small the issue may seem.
Technology is only part of the answer
The boy's parents said he had received school lessons on online safety, yet the harm still happened largely outside school systems. Filtering and monitoring are components of a whole school approach that is required to keep children safe online. These work best alongside a strong curriculum, a culture where pupils feel able to speak up, and honest conversations with parents about algorithms, phones and what children watch at home.
LGfL can help you to consider and develop your whole school approach to online safeguarding.
