Digital safeguarding in schools

As the summer holidays fade, school staff face a complex set of safeguarding and operational risks that previous generations never had to deal with. Health and safety has traditionally focused on physical safety but some of the biggest pressures now on staff are digital.

New technology brings strict data privacy rules and extra admin work. Day to day, staff are expected to take pictures and videos of pupils and upload the content to family apps and respond to parent messages. This is while schools face growing cybersecurity threats, as highlighted by a breach at the Department for Education, where 607,000 records were reportedly taken. 

Duty of care no longer ends at the school gate either. Cyberbullying follows pupils home, forcing senior leadership teams to manage complex safeguarding and mental health support.

Technology brings many advantages but it also brings new responsibilities and admin for staff. The strain of this has been labelled as technostress and is the focus of a study published in Computers in Human Behavior. The researchers noted: “The results show that interest in research on teachers’ technostress has substantially increased in recent years, especially during the pandemic.”

They added that common sources of technostress include “technological factors, workplace conditions and personal perceptions”, which affect teachers' wellbeing and overall job performance.

The full study, Technostress among teachers: A systematic literature review and future research agenda, is available on Sciencedirect.com.