Preparing for Your Annual Filtering and Monitoring Review

The Context

Statutory guidance (such as Keeping Children Safe in Education in the UK) places clear responsibilities on school leadership and governing bodies to ensure appropriate web filtering and monitoring systems are in place. Furthermore, these systems must be reviewed at least annually. However, many schools treat this review as a policy tick-box rather than a rigorous technical evaluation.

Who This Guide is For

Designated Safeguarding Leads (DSLs), headteachers, IT managers, and safeguarding governors.

Why This Matters

Failing to properly review filtering and monitoring efficacy leaves children at risk of accessing harmful content. From a compliance perspective, Ofsted (or equivalent regulatory bodies) increasingly expect leadership to demonstrate how they know their systems are working, not just that they bought a product. A failure here is a critical safeguarding failure.

What Good Looks Like

A robust annual review is a joint exercise between the DSL (who understands the safeguarding context) and the IT lead (who understands the technical configuration). It results in a documented report that tests specific scenarios, verifies alerts are reaching the right people, and confirms the system adapts to new threats.

Approach and Methodology

1. Define Roles: Ensure the DSL and the IT lead have scheduled dedicated time to conduct the review together. The IT lead cannot review safeguarding efficacy in isolation.
2. Review the Configuration: Document what categories are currently blocked and monitored. Have these categories been updated to reflect new societal trends or specific local risks?
3. Conduct Live Testing: Do not rely on reports alone. Use test accounts to actively search for restricted terms (e.g., self-harm, extremism, bypass proxies) on student devices and verify that the system blocks or flags them correctly.
4. Audit the Alert Pathway: When a test flag is triggered, how long does it take for the DSL to receive the alert? Is the alert clear? If the primary DSL is absent, does the alert route to a deputy?
5. Mobile and BYOD Devices: Verify how the filtering applies to school-owned devices taken off-site, and personal devices (BYOD) connected to the guest Wi-Fi.
6. Review Incident Logs: Analyze the past year's data. Are there recurring trends (e.g., attempts to bypass filters using VPNs) that require a change in policy or technical configuration?

Evidence to Retain

• The completed, signed Annual Filtering and Monitoring Review document.
• Logs from the live testing scenarios.
• Board minutes confirming the governors have received and understood the review.

Questions Leadership Should Ask

• "If a student searches for self-harm methods at 8:00 PM on a Friday using a school-owned Chromebook at home, who is alerted and when?"
• "Can our IT provider produce a technical configuration report that aligns with our safeguarding policy?"

Common Pitfalls

• Over-Blocking: Setting filters so restrictively that legitimate educational research is impossible, causing frustration and driving students to use 4G/5G data instead (which circumvents the school's filtering entirely).
• The "Set and Forget" Mentality: Assuming the filtering product automatically blocks all new threats without requiring manual review or configuration updates.
• IT Working in Isolation: The IT team managing the entire system without input from the DSL regarding the specific safeguarding context of the school.

How asitplan Can Help

asitplan provides schools with a framework to track their compliance tasks. By logging the annual review process as a measurable task against your IT systems, you can ensure the review happens on schedule and retain the evidence in a central location for easy retrieval during inspections.