KCSIE 2025 expanded the four Cs model of online risks – content, contact, conduct and commerce – emphasising the safeguarding harms of “misinformation, disinformation (including fake news) and conspiracy theories” in each.
- Content covers exposure to harmful material such as pornography, extreme violence, or hateful ideologies.
- Contact relates to harmful interactions such as grooming, coercion, or exploitation.
- Conduct refers to harmful behaviours by the child themselves, such as bullying, sharing indecent images, or oversharing personal data.
- Commerce focuses on financial harm such as scams, gambling, or exploitative in-game purchases.
So how can educators manage these four types of online risks?
Digital literacy and citizenship
It’s crucial that educators provide students with effective digital literacy skills, enabling them to become safe and savvy digital citizens. It’s not about telling them what not to do but what to do, helping them identify safe, respectful behaviours online.
Empathy is also important, so using stories and examples that really help students consider the feelings of others and how their actions could impact them should be part and parcel of this. It’s important for them to understand different forms of contact. We can help by going further than telling them not to talk to strangers and help them to understand the signs of harmful interactions, identify harmful content and know how they can access support.
Here are some helpful R.I.S.E. magazine articles that cover digital literacy and digital citizenship in more detail:
- Are you ready for an important change in digital learning?
- Digital character in an era of AI
- Instilling cyber ethics through storytelling
Regularly reviewing safeguarding
As AI becomes more widely used, new safeguarding risks are being introduced. It’s not just about AI; safeguarding is an area that continues to develop as technology does, as new trends rise and so on. This is why it is so important to regularly review your safeguarding policies and practices, ensuring you are up to date with standards and expectations but also that you’re ensuring what you have in place meets the specific needs of your individual school context.
Our 2025 safeguarding guide helps you understand today’s digital landscape and actions to take for better safeguarding.
Filtering and monitoring
The updated KCSIE 2025 guidance really emphasised the importance of filtering and monitoring as part of schools’ safeguarding duty, specifically in relation to the risk assessment required by the Prevent duty. Having effective filtering and monitoring systems in place will help to minimise the risk of students accessing harmful content and flag potential poor conduct or potential safeguarding risks. Online safeguarding tools (within solutions such as NetSupport DNA and classroom.cloud) can help schools block access to harmful sites and applications, including those that may cause financial harm.
Explore our safeguarding solutions see how they can help you manage online risks.