Zahra’s story of work experience at Childnet

Published: 12th July 2019

Hi!

My name is Zahra and I am a Digital Leader at Sarah Bonnell School. I am 15 years old and I have been a Digital Leader for 4 years now, I enjoy it a lot. It is really amazing and I wanted to do more, so I decided to do my work experience at Childnet this week.

I thought doing my work experience at Childnet would be a great experience to get a better understanding of how things are done and help improve my knowledge as a Childnet Digital Leader. At the start of this year I got in touch with Childnet and they were delighted to offer me a place to do work experience.

During the course of the week I have done many activities and tasks which have given me an insight into the work carried out by Childnet. On the first day I was introduced to the amazing team and was then brought into the Digital Leaders team meeting to see how they organise and plan different events and other things.

Throughout the rest of the day I met Maithi, the Policy and Communications Manager, and reviewed the website giving my input for ideas to help improve it. I also did a Twitter takeover on the Digital Leaders Twitter with top tips on online safety – which you should totally check out if you haven’t already. This was a great start to the week and I was excited to do more.

Later on during the week I met the education team and reviewed some of the primary modules. I got to review this year’s Safer Internet Day, giving some suggestions for improvements. I then got a sneak peek at next year’s theme for Safer Internet Day which I am very excited about! The team at Childnet wanted to get my ideas on the theme and I had a lot of ideas to share.

Later on I met with John, the Business Manager, who talked about the history of Childnet and about finance and fundraising. This helped me to understand how Childnet runs and understand how it started. Furthermore, I also got to help create parts of some new modules for both the primary and secondary platforms which was really interesting. I was also able to review a module and give my input on different ideas to help improve it. I was then filmed for the intros and outros for a new module so look out for that! I am really excited.

These are just some of the exciting things I got to experience at Childnet this week. The whole team were very friendly and amazing to work with. I had an amazing time and learnt many new things. Thank you to the Childnet team for allowing me to do my work experience here and for giving me an amazing time here at Childnet. Thank you to the Digital Leaders team, Danielle, Siobhan, Charlotte and Fabian for organising all these fun activities for me to do and thank you to the rest of the Childnet team, I enjoyed working with you and had a great time. It was an incredible experience. I am very sad to be leaving but have learnt a lot from this experience, being able to better understand everything in this field of work.

I hope to be more involved in further projects to do with online safety and will miss doing my work experience here at Childnet. I will continue to spread the message of online safety in my school as a Digital Leader and look forward to more opportunities to come!

Thank you Childnet!