St Vincent’s Catholic Primary School

Online Safety, Filtering and Monitoring

Part of our safeguarding duty at St Vincent's is to make sure that children know how to stay safe online and what to do if something happens online which makes them feel at risk.  For more information to help you as parents to work with us in keeping your children safe online, have a look at the e-safety information and resources under the "Parent Information" tab.

Filtering And Monitoring

Forcepoint

Our network service is provided by Warrington Borough Council who use Forcepoint as a solution to provide appropriate web filtering. Warrington Borough Council believe the service offered by the Council meets the requirements of the current legislation for appropriate filtering.

Forcepoint have an Advanced Classification Engine that performs in depth, real-time inspection of content to categorise web sites and protect users for accessing inappropriate content and malware. The service, intercepts traffic from across the school's network and is designed to protect staff and learners as much as possible.

Forcepoint have provided a response to the UK Safer Internet Centre's monitoring checklist which can be viewed below.

Filtering Exceptions And Safesearch

There are some circumstances where a filtering system does not appear to take any effect, these are:

  • Google images
  • You tube, or similar video sharing platforms
  • Other websites that collect and display clipart and/or images
  • Website adverts 

The search function within Google does have something called “SafeSearch” and this is enforced by default.

If a child does find a website that they feel is inappropriate, they know to immediately tell their teacher, who will then report it to the Council’s IT team for investigation, Warrington Borough Council are able to block websites as the need arises and inform Forcepoint so they can take the appropriate categorisation action.