Testimonial
Methodist Ladies' College
How wellbeing led the way when MLC brought IT and pastoral care together for digital safety.
This case study shows how Methodist Ladies' College (MLC) partnered its wellbeing and IT teams to move from reactive firewalls to proactive, real-time safeguarding, giving mentors visibility, staff confidence, and parents a role in keeping students safe online.
Summary
School Name
Methodist Ladies' College (MLC)
Type
Independent, Early Learning–Year 12
Location
VIC
From cyber safety education to early detection and intervention
As one of the leading independent schools in Sydney, Australia, The Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) prioritises a comprehensive pastoral care program for its students, recognising the importance of digital resilience and fostering positive online relationships. Through character education, the school aims to develop well-rounded individuals by equipping them with essential skills to navigate both the online and offline worlds.
Shore understands that while the online and offline worlds are connected, transferring offline skills to the online space is not easy. So, for them, teaching students the significance of engaging positively and productively in their digital interactions is crucial, especially since much of students’ learning and socialising happens online.
For Shore, education plays a pivotal role in providing these necessary skills. As part of this effort, the school conducts Linewize ySafe sessions to educate students on their online safety, equipping them with relevant skills and promoting responsible digital citizenship.
What Shore wasn’t seeing: navigating the challenges of online Interactions
Shore believes in a holistic approach to student digital wellbeing. And while they were adept in educating students about the online world, they also recognised the importance of equipping their staff with the tools to better help students. A way to do this was by providing them with visibility into what their students were doing online.
As with most schools, Shore had a significant challenge in gaining visibility into students’ online activities. They recognised that incidents often took place in spaces that were inaccessible to staff, and although they worked with families and the students themselves to gain insights, this resulted in an incomplete picture.
As a result, staff were unable to intervene effectively, and implement solutions that addressed the problems they were seeing, without considerable time spent investigating, which took them away from their core responsibilities.
"It’s really challenging to get visibility on what happens online with your students. These things are happening in a place you don't have access to. Which means you spend so much time time trying to find out ‘things’, they often you don’t get the opportunity to act appropriately and help what student."
How Shore uses data to:
Inform their overall Student Care Plan
Data is an integral part of Shore’s pastoral care and wellbeing strategy. It helps them identify potentially concerning or risky trends and patterns of behaviour, enabling them to intervene in a timely way.
The availability of granular data also substantiates conversations and better informs their student support intervention plans. Findings from trend data assist the school to source speakers with relevant expertise and to implement initiatives that address specific student concerns.
Get a holistic picture of each child’s wellbeing
In addition to academic and absenteeism information that most schools collect, Shore now also gathers specific insights from their Linewize solutions around what their students are searching for, who may be potentially at risk and how they are tracking in the online world.
Linewize Monitor helps them understand the context and interactions their students are having. A human moderator assesses cases that need immediate attention and promptly notifies the school if necessary.
By understanding the broader context of each student’s situation, the school is able to tailor effective recommendations to help get students back on track. In certain cases, they may request additional details from the student, consult with parents, involve other teachers, or engage relevant students connected to the situation. This collaborative approach ensures the identification of the most suitable resolutions, tailored to each student’s unique circumstances.
Measure Program Effectiveness
Data analysis enables Shore to measure the effectiveness of its pastoral programs. Examining the frequency and themes of online incidents has helped the school refine and enhance its strategies, ensuring they align with the evolving needs of each individual student.
Distribute ownership and equip the whole school community
Shore understands that a holistic strategy must empower the whole school community to be an instrumental partner in the digital safety and wellbeing of their students. The school equips parents and guardians with relevant information, guiding them to have regular conversations with students. This has helped foster a collaborative environment at Shore, where everyone works together towards the students’ overall wellbeing.
The challenge was never really a technology problem
MLC is no stranger to innovation. The school of 2,200 students, from early learning through to Year 12, was the first school in the world to introduce laptops, back in 1990. Digital learning is in its DNA.
But as devices became more powerful and more pervasive, something was shifting. Digital distraction was no longer just a learning issue, it was becoming a wellbeing one.
Learning and wellbeing are intricately linked at MLC: when a student is learning well, their wellbeing is thriving, and vice versa. What the wellbeing team was seeing, though, was the reverse, students accessing harmful or inappropriate content during school hours, social comparison fuelling anxiety, unkind conversations happening behind screens. With seven counsellors managing growing caseloads, the consequences were visible every day.
The school's existing firewall systems simply weren't built for this. MLC needed to stop being reactive and start getting ahead of problems before they escalated.
The turning point: wellbeing bought the why, IT bought the how
What made this project work was a genuine partnership between teams who each brought something the other couldn't. The shared purpose and collaborative leadership helped to make this a success.
The wellbeing team understood what students were experiencing, what conversations needed to happen, and what good safeguarding looked like in practice. The IT team knew how to evaluate vendors, integrate systems, and roll out at scale without disrupting the school day.
Together, the two teams built a set of vendor selection criteria that reflected both priorities.
Our Vendor Selection Criteria
- Strong real-time safeguarding and monitoring capabilities
- Ease of use for teaching and mentoring staff
- Robust classroom management features
- Integration with existing systems
- Scalability across year levels
- Transparency for parents
The solution they landed on was Linewize, combining Filtering, Monitor, and Classroom Manager (formerly Classwize).
A staged rollout not a big bang
One of the most important decisions the team made was about pace. The wellbeing and IT leads were much further along in their thinking than the broader staff, reminding each other to slow down turned out to be one of the most valuable disciplines of the whole rollout.
MLC began with a trial in Year 8, working through technical issues and process questions before expanding in stages: Years 7 and 9 next, then 10 and 11, then finally the junior school.
"Going slowly with Year 8 first meant that by the time we got to the rest of the school, we already had real stories and real answers, not just theory."
- Year 8 Mentor Teacher
Getting the alerting structure right
One of the most consequential design decisions was how Monitor's tiered alerting system would work in practice. At MLC, Levels 1 and 2 alerts are kept in the system for pattern recognition but don't trigger emails to staff. Level 3 alerts, unkind language in emails or Teams, early signs of social exclusion, searches suggesting a student is struggling go to mentor teachers, each responsible for around 12 students. That small group size was deliberate: it reduced alert fatigue and let mentors feel equipped rather than overwhelmed.
Level 4 alerts, covering sustained concerns like ongoing bullying or self-harm indicators, go to student coordinators or deputy heads. Level 5, the most critical, requiring immediate action, triggers direct contact with college leadership. The whole system is anchored in MLC's existing student management policies, so when an alert lands, everyone already knows whose responsibility it is.
Training staff to read context, not just alerts
When the system first went live, the instinct was to treat every alert as an emergency. The training challenge was teaching staff to pause and ask two questions: is this time critical, and is the student at risk of harm right now?
"A student researching an anime character's storyline is a very different conversation to a student in real distress. Learning to read the context around the words, not just the words themselves, changed how we responded.
- Mentor Teacher
An unexpected benefit has been the effect on students' own behaviour. When students know that language like "I want to kill myself" prompts a conversation with a trusted adult, they think before they type. Training was built around real scenarios from the Year 8 trial, with staff who'd managed those situations acting as champions for their colleagues. Over time, the team has moved from alarm to calm confidence and safeguarding staff wellbeing, not just students', has become part of the picture too.
When the system saves a student
The clearest measure of whether a safeguarding tool is working isn't the number of alerts it generates, it's what happens because of them.
In one instance, a Level 5 alert identified a student as highly anxious, at significant risk, and experiencing suicidal ideation. Because the team had been monitoring the student over time, they also had context about her home situation and level of parental support.
"Intervention was immediate, and the student was safeguarded. That's not surveillance for its own sake. That's visibility in service of care and it's the whole reason we did this."
- Wellbeing Lead, MLC
Bringing parents along
Parents were broadly supportive from the outset. MLC communicated transparently throughout the rollout and paired the monitoring changes with a mobile phone ban, which helped frame the message clearly. Monitoring runs from 8:20am to 3:30pm; after that, parents can use a companion parental tool to set their own limits, apply time restrictions, and monitor activity at home.
Uptake on the parent tool has been lower than hoped, around 7%. The honest reflection from the team: educating parents on why the tool matters, and how to use it, needed more attention during the rollout, something worth building in from the start for any school starting a similar journey.
Looking ahead
Parents were broadly supportive from the outset. MLC communicated transparently throughout the rollout and paired the monitoring changes with a mobile phone ban, which helped frame the message clearly. Monitoring runs from 8:20am to 3:30pm; after that, parents can use a companion parental tool to set their own limits, apply time restrictions, and monitor activity at home.
Uptake on the parent tool has been lower than hoped, around 7%. The honest reflection from the team: educating parents on why the tool matters, and how to use it, needed more attention during the rollout, something worth building in from the start for any school starting a similar journey.
"What is one digital wellbeing or safeguarding issue in your school that could benefit from a stronger partnership between IT and wellbeing? For us, that question was the beginning of something significant."
- Wellbeing Lead, MLC
