The key features of a safe school website

The following guidance is endorsed by Salford LEA.

The prime purpose of any website is to provide information. Having a school website will enable you to tell the world that your school exists, provide information for existing pupils and parents, or promote the school to prospective ones.

The site can be used to showcase examples of pupils' work - in words, pictures, sound or movie clips - and can share resources for teaching and learning both within the school and with colleagues elsewhere.

It is the duty of the school to ensure that every child in their care is safe, and the same principles should apply to the virtual presence of a school as would be applied to its physical buildings. Schools must ensure that no individual child can be identified or contacted either via, or as a result of a visitor using, the school website.

The school should establish clear policies to ensure that its website is effective, and does not compromise the safety of the pupils or staff.

When formulating your school website policy, consider:

Does the school have its own website? If so, is there a senior member of staff responsible for the school's website?
Are there clear policies and approval processes regarding the content that can be loaded to the school's website?
Are pupils involved with the actual loading and maintenance of content on the school's website? Do they have clear guidelines? Is their work thoroughly checked?
Is the website regularly checked to ensure that there is no content that compromises the safety of pupils or staff?
Does the school adopt safe practices regarding the publication of images and names of pupils on its website?
Does the school's website make use of a webcam? If so, are safety measures in place to prevent misuse, accidental or otherwise?
If the school's website uses facilities such as guestbooks, noticeboards or weblogs, are they checked to ensure that they do not contain personal details?
Does the school allow pupils to create their own websites on the school's network? If so, can the school ensure that they adhere to all of the above points?
Can the school be certain that it is not infringing the intellectual property rights of others through any of the materials available via its website?
Copyright may apply to text, images, music or video that originate from other sources. How will the school protect its own copyright in terms of the materials it publishes on its website?

Domain names

Nominet UK is the officially recognised registry for UK domain names.

Schools should ensure that the registration of their domain name remains up-to-date to prevent them from losing the right to use it.

All domain names ending in .uk last for two years from the date of registration, and your registration agent (normally Salford City Council) should notify you in advance of expiry. For more information about domain name registration and renewal see the Nominet UK website.

See also (for city council directorates only): domain name policy.

Cyber squatting and typo squatting

Cyber squatting and typo squatting are recognised problems in the area of domain name registration.

Cyber squatting is when companies or individuals register the domain names of legitimate companies or organisations, often in the hope of making quick financial gains by selling the domain name back to the company.

Typo squatting, also referred to as ‘typo piracy’, is when misspellings of domain names are registered in order to poach potential visitors away, often to inappropriate or pornography-based websites.

Although both of these issues are more likely to affect commercial companies, schools should nevertheless be aware of them, and check their domain names periodically. If schools do find that either of these issues present a problem, they should seek legal advice through their LEA in the first instance.

Useful resources

There are many resources in the form of websites, books and software tools available to assist with the theory and technical process of creating a website.

Here is a small selection - there will be many others!

Get Safe Online - advice and information about Internet safety for parents and teachers, plus opportunities to discuss problems and share solutions. This guidance is intended to make adults more aware of how to use the Internet safely, so that they can encourage safe behaviour online among children and young people.

Creating and managing a school website - a useful downloadable document from Learning and Teaching Scotland with plenty of common sense guidance on creating a great school website.

Kidsmart - a practical internet safety programme website for schools, young people, parents, and agencies, produced by the children's internet charity Childnet International.

Toolkit for internet safety - published by the European Union's internet safety portal.