Safeguarding

Keyword monitoring

By monitoring the online safety keywords and phrases your students type, your school can gain an insight into any trending issues, as well as identify individual students who are engaged in concerning activity.

The keyword monitoring tool is powered by a pre-supplied online safety database of keywords and phrases, containing over 20,000 terms! The database covers a wide range of topics from self-harm, gambling, bullying, and racism – to risks of radicalization, drugs, sexual exploitation, and more.

Triggered events/keywords can also be deleted by nominated users (if it’s a false-positive, for example), with the action recorded as an entry in the Audit Log.

Language packs: Several language packs are included to ensure your school can monitor concerning activity in students’ first languages. Slang terms are also taken into account, which can be crucial in intercepting inappropriate communications of young people who can sometimes appear to have their own language!

Updating and sharing your keywords: We update the database regularly with new terms because, as we all know, it’s an ever-changing landscape. To help with this, classroom.cloud not only gives you the power to add your own keywords to the database that are relevant to your school and community and even share them across your District/Trust – you can also share them with us, if you want to! That way, you can help all schools be as safe as possible by working together with us to provide the most up-to-date and relevant keywords to help keep all of our children safe.

AI monitoring

Building on our Microsoft Teams safeguarding platform, we can now capture Copilot triggers when the student is signed into Copilot using their school’s account. When a student is using the AI tool and triggers a safeguarding alert, the event is captured along with details of the application in use. Students’ Copilot chats can also be monitored. You can filter the events to only view those captured in an AI tool or website. This helps safeguarding staff understand the context of the trigger and identify activity involving AI tools.

Word cloud of trending topics

When a keyword or phrase is triggered from something a student has typed, copied, or searched for, it populates a word cloud. This is a nice easy way to spot trending topics. Click on any word in the cloud and you can see a full explanation and definition to help you understand the potential risk, along with a detailed list of instances where it has been triggered by your students.

Capturing concerning activity

In addition to populating the word cloud, each triggered keyword is also captured immediately as an ‘event’. And according to how severe these are, staff can view them as a simple text record (low severity), a screenshot of the screen, or a screen recording (high severity). For all events, you can review information including details such as student name, the device being used, and the time it took place, along with the Risk Index analysis…

The contextual intelligence-based Risk Index helps your school determine the severity of triggered events and ensures you can quickly and easily identify and support vulnerable students.

It works like this: The Risk Index assesses the context and history of a student’s current activities (the device used, time of day, websites visited and applications used) and considers them alongside any previous alerts they may have triggered. From this information, it creates a risk index number that is applied to the event. So, if a student has repeatedly researched an online safety topic (e.g. suicide) out of hours, in an unmonitored setting such as the library, a high risk index could result. A lower index rating could come from a student searching a lower risk keyword in a local application during school hours that may have been used for curriculum topics.

You can configure email alerts to inform the appropriate staff when students trigger a monitored keyword or phrase – and the online safety tab gives you an easy-to-see overview of when new triggers occur.

Keeping track of events

New events are flagged on the online safety tab of the web portal so you can see immediately how many phrase matches have been identified and are ready for review.

To help staff to keep track of which triggers need reviewing (or to let supporting staff know where to pick up when you are on holiday), all new events are highlighted as being ‘new’ – and, as you review them, they can be marked as ‘in progress’ or ‘complete’. You can also add notes and enter details of any follow-up actions. In addition, you can print, save, or email details of a triggered event, or forward a screen grab of the results to a co-worker to follow up on.

Plus, if staff have access to multiple sites, they can now view triggered events across all of them at once (if selected), making it even quicker to find and support those in need.

Online safety summary reports: Create and send custom (daily/weekly/monthly) phrase match and student concern reports to nominated staff. The email alert contains a link to the portal where the information will be displayed. Watch a video here.

Power BI: Once connected with classroom.cloud, you can load ImageMatches and PhraseMatches tables into your Power BI desktop app. You can then create and manage detailed reports.

Integration with Tes MyConcern and CPOMS: For schools with a Tes MyConcern or CPOMS account, you can now directly integrate it with classroom.cloud. This means that when you’re reviewing a triggered event, you can link it to a student in your Tes MyConcern or CPOMS account – and you can continue to view the event in both classroom.cloud and in Tes MyConcern and CPOMS.

Choose your monitoring settings

The last thing anyone wants when monitoring online digital safety is false alarms. So, to help you reduce these, you can also choose whether to exclude certain applications and websites from being monitored. So, for example, if students are using PowerPoint or Excel, you could exempt them from monitoring so you can focus on more high-risk areas.

Integration with Microsoft Teams (No extra charge): You can choose to connect the school’s Microsoft 365 tenancy so you can monitor Teams chats, channels, and more. In the same way, you can exclude selected channels and users from monitoring, such as teachers’ chats. The filtering of Teams groups has been enhanced to make it easier to find the group you would like to monitor for online safety purposes.

Blur images: When reviewing a triggered event, if you are concerned about exposing a staff member to pictures that might offend, you can choose to blur any images or screenshots. The blurring of images can also help events to be reviewed sensitively with students.

Online Safety Groups: These can be created to deliver focused monitoring of, for example, specific year groups or students considered vulnerable. Specific settings can be applied to each group of student devices, and you will now be able to specify the online safety user who should receive alerts for any triggers made by students who are members of the specified groups. You can also group and filter the keyword/phrase list and any concerns reported by students by online safety group.

Overnight filter: In the Activity tool, you can apply an overnight filter to identify activity outside of school hours. When you select the Start Time Range filter, you can set a time range that spans two days, enabling you to check for overnight activity on student school devices. This can help highlight potential safeguarding concerns early on.

Empower students

Report a concern: Students can now report a concern by sending a message in confidence to a trusted member of staff. (Android support coming soon). You can select staff to be ‘Concern contacts’ and they will automatically receive an email that confirms the concern logged by a student in classroom.cloud. You can also choose additional staff members to receive the emails who aren’t a primary ‘Concern contact,’ such as those who might need to monitor the issues being reported by students, such as a Headteacher or School Principal.

Concern categories: When online safety staff review a concern, they can assign it to a category. For example, if the concern is about ‘Depression’ or ‘Domestic abuse’ it could be assigned to the Wellbeing category – this is handy when reviewing what type of concerns are being reported. The categories mirror those used with our keyword lists, making it easy to build a picture of any safeguarding issues for a particular student.

Online resources: Students have instant access to a range of validated online support resources, including details of helplines and charities (covering topics such as FGM, drug addiction, grooming, and bullying), enabling them to explore wellbeing issues on their terms. Staff can also manage the pre-populated list and add any additional resources they feel are appropriate.

Keeping things super secure

The very nature of online digital safety means that it’s a sensitive area that requires confidentiality.

Staff access levels: To help, classroom.cloud allows schools to set up two levels of staff access:

• Online Safety Admins (giving full access to the tools and events)
• Online Safety Users (who can only see triggered keywords and phrases).

This ensures only authorized members of staff can access the details of triggered incidents and control the online safety settings.

Schools can enable/disable Organisation Administrators’ access to the Online Safety view. When disabled, the person will not be able to see the list of triggered keywords and student details, nor the concerns students report. Schools can ensure that only nominated users can view the data – adding an extra layer of security.

Safeguarding views: By configuring a safeguarding view, you can control your safeguarding team’s access to safeguarding data (phrase and image matches) to ensure they only see data relevant to their roles, such as the year group they are responsible for.

It also enhances data privacy by restricting access to necessary information only and helps to minimize the risk of accidental data breaches.

Monitoring hours: Your school can also specify when you want the students to be monitored, for example, only during school hours or at all times when the student is using their school device or on the school network.

Enhanced Safeguarding (optional)

The Image Analysis feature helps to monitor and detect inappropriate images displayed on students’ screens from websites, apps, and media – under the following categories: Adult, Drugs, Racism, Radicalization, and Weapon. Schools can enable these categories as needed and an alert is sent to staff when a student may have viewed the harmful content.

(Note: This feature is only available if you have Enhanced Safeguarding enabled on your account and on Windows students using 64-bit systems).

Ask your Account Manager today about this feature.

Watch this short video to see it in action!

Assisted Monitoring (optional for UK schools)

We’ve partnered with SWGfL to soon offer Assisted Monitoring, providing an extra pair of hands for UK school safeguarding teams. The team at SWGfL can monitor safeguarding alerts within your classroom.cloud account, helping to assess and prioritise concerns so your team can respond swiftly and effectively. Paired with weekly reports, this additional human insight provides an extra layer of support for the triage of student safeguarding concerns.