Smoothwall

[mynamechangemyrules]

Hi, my school has started using Smoothwall this week. They have not informed anyone except the DSLs. I know as I questioned a colleague about not being able to access a site (RSPB!! But it was from a sponsored link)

It is across all the school wifi, so covers our own devices.

We have always had filtering systems (obviously), but the person relayed that all keystrokes/ searches and sites would be recorded and flagged if necessary.

I have two questions;

1. Should they (legally or just ethically) have informed us and/ or parents and students?
2. Due to fairly complex issues (do read my posts on the divorce board if you want the long story 😬) I have children on their schools' safeguarding registers plus I have meetings weekly with a DV therapy team via NHS(during one of my lunch breaks usually).

As all keystrokes and searches will be monitored from now on, in order to maintain my privacy, do I have to come off staff wifi and connect to 4G to search related items or look at the group DV page? I rarely do at school but I have done when urgently required, and wish to ensure that my colleagues do not know the details of my personal life by means of it flashing up at some safeguarding meeting. At my last workplace, pre divorce, I was on the safeguarding register myself but my colleagues were sane and efficient and I do not have the same luxury at this workplace... I don't want them knowing anything about my circumstances basically and am worried I'll type something on my phone during a lunch break and get called in for a safeguarding meeting 😳

You will need to check the 'acceptable usage policy' for both school devices and wifi, which you will have had to agree to somewhere along the line. There is very likely a clause in there about the monitoring of network usage. I suspect this would cover them legally; the ethics are a bit more subjective but tbh anyone using a work network should assume that their internet history etc is not private.

It's very poor practice to have staff or student personal devices routinely connecting to the school wifi. 'Forget' the network from your phone and use your own mobile data connection for anything personal.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've never used school wifi before moving to this job- but the school has no network coverage for any mobile provider's data services so if I wish to receive WhatsApp messages/ emails/ push notifications from my children's schools then I have to be on the school wifi under the 'staff' wifi. I actually changed my mobile provider as some staff reported patches of coverage with a different provider... but I'd still have to walk out of school to the main road to actually get it so that was a waste of admin time 😂

Ah, sorry - you mentioned coming off wifi and onto 4G so I thought that might be an option.

I'm sorry, I don't think it's going to be safe for you to use the wifi given how paramount your privacy is in this very difficult situation. Generally there won't be a human routinely monitoring staff usage but there will be certain key words set up to flag usage for review, and it sounds like the nature of your DV support is likely to contain words on this list.