Dear principals and teachers,

Thank you for all the work you and your colleagues are doing during the COVID-19 pandemic to lessen the anxiety of your whole community. As students enter this new world of online learning, never has online safety been so important.

Given the changing environment we are currently living in, eSafety is focused on providing the most up to date material about maintaining online safety. Our home page now has a direct link to our latest information relevant to COVID-19.

I encourage you to read eSafety’s COVID-19 related blogposts:

•  An online safety kit for parents and carers
•  Protecting children from online abuse 
•  Keeping schools and learning safe online 

All have links to useful resources for students, teachers and parents, as well as guidelines for effective child protection. The eSafety website also has information about helping children to develop good habits and supporting them while they are online.  

Students and educators 

Currently, online safety for students is addressed at many levels through the Australian Curriculum. eSafety provided input to ACARA’s recently developed online safety curriculum connection.  This new resource is a guide for educators to identify content in the Australian Curriculum that supports the teaching and learning of online safety. eSafety has also developed a range of classroom resources that support the curriculum. 

We offer professional learning for educators and our new 2 hour accredited (NESA and TQI) webinars ‘Online safety module – risks and protective factors’, start on the 8th April 2020. These will be delivered throughout Terms 2 and 3 and eSafety encourages all teachers to participate.

We also endorse providers of online safety education for in-school training – some of which have capacity for online delivery. The endorsement is a rigorous process, so schools can select a Trusted eSafety Provider with confidence, knowing they have met a range of mandatory requirements. 

Whole community engagement and education

eSafety has developed a toolkit to assist schools in preventing and responding to online safety issues, including advice on how to upskill students and educators and how to engage parents and the community. It is recommended that you use the online safety self-assessment tool to assess your school’s online safety environment. It provides tailored suggestions to help schools improve practices, whatever stage they are at currently.