Guide for schools
School online safety courses: what to look for
Choosing an online safety course for secondary students? Here is what the guidance expects, what makes a course work in a real classroom, and the questions worth asking any provider, including us.
What the guidance expects
The Department for Education's Keeping children safe in education (KCSIE) expects schools to teach pupils to stay safe online as part of a broader safeguarding approach, and to cover the risks young people actually meet. It groups online risk into four areas, often called the four Cs:
- Content: being exposed to harmful material, including misinformation and disinformation.
- Contact: harmful interaction with other people online, such as grooming or pressure to share images.
- Conduct: online behaviour that increases risk, including bullying and sharing images.
- Commerce: risks such as scams, phishing and inappropriate advertising.
Online safety also sits within relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) and the Computing curriculum. A course does not replace your safeguarding policy, filtering and monitoring, or staff training. It supports the teaching part.
What makes a student course work
- Short and active. Students retain more when they do something: sorting, spotting, deciding, rather than reading screens of text. Look for activities, scenarios and quick checks, not just slides and a quiz at the end.
- Written for the age group. Plain language, realistic examples, and no lecturing. Students switch off from content that feels like it was written for someone else.
- Covers all four Cs. Check the modules line up with the risks above, including passwords and account security, privacy, social media, scams and misinformation, and wellbeing.
- Tells students who to talk to. A good course makes it obvious who your Designated Safeguarding Lead is and how to report a worry.
- Gives you evidence. You should be able to see who has completed it and show that to a governor, inspector or parent, without chasing students.
- Works for everyone. Look for accessibility features such as adjustable text, colours and spacing, keyboard use, and support for screen readers, and for it working on the school's own devices.
Questions to ask any provider
- What personal data about students do you collect, where is it stored, and when is it deleted?
- Will you sign a data processing agreement, and can I see your data protection impact assessment?
- Can students cheat the assessment or get a certificate without doing the work?
- How much teacher time does it need to run, and what does the teacher see?
- How are statistics and claims in the course sourced and kept up to date?
- Is the ICO registration current, and who do I contact if something goes wrong?
How Online Ready answers those questions
Online Ready is a school online safety course for UK secondary students: seven short interactive modules, each about 30 minutes, covering cyberbullying, passwords and account security, privacy, social media, phishing and scams, misinformation, and wellbeing. Students join with a class code, and a teacher dashboard shows progress and certificates.
- Students give only a display name and a PIN. No email address, date of birth or home address is collected.
- Quizzes are marked on our server, so a certificate cannot be forged from the browser, and every certificate can be verified.
- Student records are deleted automatically every 1 September. Read our data protection impact assessment, privacy policy and security page.
- Every statistic is sourced and checked, and each module maps to KCSIE, RSHE and Computing.
- Accessibility options include text size, spacing, typeface, colour themes and a reading ruler. See our accessibility statement.