The New Zealand Ministry of Education requires all schools and kura to develop and regularly review school policies. Policies form the foundations of a school’s operation and identify key obligations. They state a school’s commitment to providing safe learning environments for students and staff and inform school processes and procedures to ensure consistency. Linewize has put together guidance to assist New Zealand schools in reviewing and formulating an online safety policy.
Online spaces and digital devices play an increasingly important role in learning, highlighting the need for schools to acknowledge their online safety approaches and strategy in their policy documentation. The policy guides internal processes and procedures and consistency across the school.
Some schools and kura opt to update existing policies around wellbeing, bullying and health & safety to include online safety. More recently, however, there has been a shift towards schools developing explicit documentation to guide the safe, responsible and informed use of digital devices and online spaces within the learning environment.
Our team of education specialists and cyber experts have created an Online Safety Policy template (see below) to help schools ensure they have updated and relevant information in place. The template includes specific guidance around the Linewize solutions. While our policy template can be used in its entirety, we strongly encourage all schools to customise it to suit their unique context and needs. The process of customisation should involve consultation with the wider school community.
To support schools and kura wishing to review & update an existing policy(s) or develop a new policy around online safety and wellbeing, we have created a checklist that you can follow. Key actions to undertake before the policy review or development process have been identified, along with a checklist of key areas schools need to include. You can download the checklist below.
We strongly recommend that this template is customised to fit the unique context of each school. The template includes specific guidance around Linewize solutions. You can download the template in either Word or PDF format - whichever best suits your purposes.
Join Pauline, Matt and Toni as they discuss why these policies are critical to school cyber safety and how your school can adapt and utilise the Online Safety Policy template to suit your needs.