Cyberbullying via Schools own internal email!

[chico123]

Hello, First time here after a very stressful week with my 15 year old sons school. A week ago he began to complain that he could not concentrate in his Computer class as a couple of the other students were emailing on the school internal email about him. I questioned how this could happen in a class room setting, under teachers noses, and via the school email where all the mails are checked etc.. Anyway to cut a long story short that's exactly what has been happening for the past month! These boys have been able to email each other under their school email accounts offensive material about my son, teachers and other items, unchecked and undetected for 4 weeks. In fact if I hadn't phoned the school, I doubt these boys would ever have been challenged. The school have admitted that during class it is not always possible to see what every student is doing on their screen, but I am staggered that whilst the school bangs on about children being IT aware etc that not one of these mails was picked up or monitored in a month. The kids involved are being dealt with but I am disgusted at how lax the school have been and how on earth this can happen in lessons and on an internal system! So it would appear not even the school can exercise its own protection policy. Just wondered if anyone else had experience of this similar scenario. I am considering referring to Ofsted.

Many thanks

[Ionacat]

It depends on whether they used any words/images that get flagged up on the monitoring software. IT support in schools is usually the minimum. It sounds like the school are dealing with this, but I would be seeking reassurances and finding out what measures they are putting in place to be stopping this happening again.

Ofsted will not be interested for the moment. They do not investigate or deal with parental complaints unless it is about a small range of specific things and you must have exhausted the school's complaints procedure first, which will include head, governors. It is then usually LEA/Education funding agency and DFES.

[TeenAndTween]

I'm not surprised. A teacher can't see exactly what is going on, on all screens. Schools have the ability to check emails, but won't unless key words used or if asked to.

Your son (eventually) reported to you.
You reported to school.
Action has been taken.

In my view the system has worked.

At DD's school the boys would have their accounts suspended.

[chico123]

Hi. Thanks for your comments. Boys in question been dealt with severely. however the contents of the mail were of a 'serious nature' according to school, and abusive about a number of people. Parents beware. Kids can find a way around things to get at people. The system is flawed on this occasion. Thanks for helpful comments

[noblegiraffe]

Emails at school are logged but not actively monitored. Software would pick out e.g. swear words to flag up for monitoring.

There is no way that a school would be able to read every email sent by students.

[cricketballs]

as others have said; the software will pick up words but can not check the content of each email we also don't have the man power to physically read it. We do warn students that we have access to their emails and if a situation like your DS is concerned we can access all emails sent, received etc.

In terms of using email during CS lessons, this is easily done and unless the teacher is sat at his machine watching the screens through another piece of software then they can very easily sneak onto their email; they may also be using email within the lesson, for example to send work to the teacher.

Kids can find a way around things very true, we are often playing catch up with the blocking system as some websites will use very innocent names/words/tags within the site but the images are from it and it is amazing how they find out the sites in the first place