Ms Fiona Jennings:

I thank the Deputy. I am delighted to come in on this issue. I thought those four students from Tallaght and Kinsale were just fabulous last week. I think I speak for everybody here when I say we all had a little smile on our faces when they were commenting on their experience of online safety education.

In 2017, with the support of the Vodafone Ireland Foundation, we were in a position to hold a consultation with more than 100 young people on this exact point on the experience of online safety education. A couple of things came out of that in that, first, there was a huge disparity in the quality and the frequency of online safety education received and, second, they felt online safety education should be on the curriculum and viewed as a life skills subject.

It is probably a broader discussion outside the role of the online safety commissioner but I can understand it when they talk about being lectured about this. We can often feel lectured when is something is coming up randomly and sporadically. If we really want our children to be digitally confident and we want them to have a good understanding of online safety, we need to embed it across the curriculum. I would even suggest messages at a preschool level. I was recently reading a book to my daughter, who is five, and I was surprised to see there were messages in the book on how to keep safe online. Deputy Mythen talked about his grandchildren and the smart toys they have, and the education that is needed around that. On the back of that, for parents, grandparents and carers, again with the support of the Vodafone Ireland Foundation, we were able to develop a digital-ready hub, which has a plethora of resources that cover issues such as digital resilience, privacy and security, online harm and cyberbullying. Again, I can share the link afterwards.

I can totally understand where they were coming from. If it was more embedded across the curriculum, we would have many more digitally competent students at the end of it.