Mr. Simon Grehan:

Webwise is an initiative of PDST. We are co-funded by the European Commission and the Department's teacher education section. We are part of the Safer Internet Ireland consortium, which is a project offering helpline, hotline and awareness raising actions under the co-ordination of the Department of Justice and Equality's Office for Internet Safety.

We are also a member of a pan-European network called the Insafe network, where we share resources and best practice with similar organisations in 27 countries around Europe.

Our approach is schools are best placed for reaching the majority of children, regardless of age, income or background. The focus of our awareness actions is to provide relevant support to schools to build their capacity to promote safer, more effective use of the Internet by children. We do this by working with teams within the professional development service for teachers to integrate the appropriate Internet safety content into supports provided to schools in continuing professional development and in-school supports. We also support schools in the development and updating of the appropriate policies that relate to children's use of technology, particularly Internet acceptable use policies. One of our key actions around increasing capacity in the system is to develop curriculum resources that can be used by teachers in classrooms to address key issues around children's use of the Internet as part of the social, personal, health and education curriculum at both primary and post-primary levels. For example, we have produced the My Selfie resource, which teachers can use for fifth and sixth class pupils to address the issue of cyberbullying as part of the implementation of the curriculum. Similarly, there is a Lockers resource, which is an equivalent resource for addressing the issue of "sexting" or the non-consensual sharing of intimate images as part of the junior cycle social, personal, health and education curriculum. Resources in this area also support school leaders in addressing incidents of sexting in schools and updating their policy, as well as informing them of the legal framework in this area.

One of our key actions is to provide information, advice and tools to parents and teachers through digital channels, especially our website, www.webwise.ie. In the past year we have had more than 1 million visitors to this website. The key focus of our awareness raising activities every year is Safer Internet Day, an event in February where we try to get focus from stakeholders and schools on issues around children's use of the Internet through hosting stakeholder-led, teacher-led and youth-led activities. This year, 420 schools and 75,000 children throughout the country participated. There were 281 media items covering actions on that. We also run social media campaigns targeting children directly with messages that echo and reinforce the messaging they get as part of the education programmes. It is important children receive these messages in the online communities where they spend their time as well as in the classroom. All the work we do is supported by a youth advisory panel comprising 30 young people between the ages of 12 and 18 from around the country.