Digital Leaders educate industry experts and Ministers during Safer Internet Day 2019

Published: 15th February 2019

Childnet Digital Leaders made a huge splash at this year’s Safer Internet Day event at the BT Centre in central London. Safer Internet Day is organised each year in the UK by the UK Safer Internet Centre. Digital Leaders from Hoxton Garden Primary, Kaizen Primary School, Mayfield School, Orchard Primary School, Sarah Bonnell School, Southwold Primary School and Titus Salt School all attended the event along with Dr Challoner’s High School and Dundonald Primary School. They facilitated the day, delivered the key note speech, spoke on the youth panel and ran workshops to educate attendees on how to be safe online, while focusing on this year’s theme of ‘Our internet, our choice: understanding consent in a digital world’.

Israa from Sarah Bonnell School was an incredible youth host during the entire afternoon, introducing speakers to the stage including Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Margot James, Department for Education Minister for Children and Families, Nadhim Zahawi, and BT’s CEO of Consumer Brands, Marc Allera. She demonstrated her good humour and bubbly personality all to a highly professional standard – awesome job, Israa!

Will from Titus Salt School was our youth keynote speaker. He had the whole auditorium’s attention and during his speech he was confident, articulate and inspirational! Not only this, but he was also interviewed by BBC Own It and BBC News and must have come away feeling like a true celebrity – you were absolutely fantastic; well done, Will!

Mayfield School look at permission online

Mayfield School’s workshop looked at the different ways people give permission for their data to be used online. They asked visitors to vote, on a sliding scale, on what sorts of data they were happy to share and how happy they were to share that data on various different platforms. They had a ‘True or False’ data quiz which, whilst being incredibly fun, also surprised many visitors with its answers! An example of a statement was from WhatsApp’s privacy policy and said ‘Once a message has been delivered, it no longer resides on our servers’. Many visitors were amazed that this was true! Margot James also visited their workshop and engaged in some interesting discussions with them.

Kaizen Primary School explore how we give consent online

Kaizen Primary School’s workshop asked guests to respond to a series of statements about online consent, and then to explore different ways that we can ask for, give and receive consent. They also asked guests to record on a Padlet why consent is important to them and where they would expect to give consent. You can see the range of responses at the following link: https://padlet.com/admin413/SID2019

Sarah Bonnell School discuss different types of consent

Sarah Bonnell School ran a workshop to discuss the different types of consent we might encounter online, and then used an online interactive platform to submit how you could best respond to different scenarios.

Viridis Schools Federation get the guests thinking about gaming

The Viridis Schools Federation is made up of Hoxton Garden Primary, Orchard Primary School and Southwold Primary School.

These three schools used a gaming scenario to ask guests to decide how issues of consent online can make them feel and the emotions it can cause. They were then asked to consider what they could do to make sure consent is asked for. They also ran a great quiz on online issues!

We also saw a youth panel consisting of six young people, four of whom were Digital Leaders. These were Harriet from Kaizen Primary, Homyra from Mayfield School, Zahra from Sarah Bonnell and Morgan from Southwold Primary. They all did a brilliant job talking about consent and answering questions from Kate Russell, a BBC journalist – a great effort and confidence shown by all!

Digital Leaders interview the UK’s Chief Medical Officer

Israa and Maariyah, Digital Leaders from Sarah Bonnell School, were invited by BBC News to interview Professor Dame Sally Davies, the UK Chief Medical Officer, about the official guidance released about children’s screen time. They did a great job – well done to both of you!

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