Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)
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Question 477: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the arrangements in place for teaching children in primary and post-primary school about safe browsing of content on the Internet; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [30604/07]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I launched the internet safety initiative, Webwise, which was developed by the National Centre for Technology in Education (NCTE) in February, 2006. The Webwise website, www.webwise.ie, provides information and resources in four specific areas, surfing, chatting, sharing and gaming to teachers, parents and students to help ensure that children and young people have positive and safe on-line experiences. The NCTE published the Webwise Internet Safety Education Pack which was distributed to schools in March 2007. This pack is designed as an adaptive resource to enable individual schools to be proactive in the area of internet safety. The pack contains the Surfwise Educational Programme, an Internet safety programme for 7-14 year olds, which focuses on the key Internet Safety issues that relate to use of the Internet by children in schools. As well as classroom and take-home activity sheets, this education programme contains online interactive lessons that use animated characters to demonstrate how to search safely and how to check that information they come across online is reliable. Now accompanied by the Chatwise Educational Programme, which addresses safe communication on the Internet, both learning modules are available on the Webwise website.

A course for teachers on Integrating Internet Safety into Teaching and Learning was developed by Webwise and is available as part of the NCTE's teaching skills initiative through the regional Education Centres. A suite of thirteen Internet safety lessons has been developed by Webwise in collaboration with the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) Post Primary Support Service. The lessons focus on personal safety issues and the Internet, as well as Internet Literacy issues so that children may develop skills in ways of keeping safe when using ICT. These classroom resources are to enable teachers and students embed safer Internet practice into their use of new media. These learning resources will be integrated into SPHE in-service training from January 2008.

The NCTE's watchyourspace.ie website offers practical tips and advice and supports teenagers who use the web. A key feature is the advice given by teenagers to teenagers on how to cope with the fall-out from abuses and misuse of social networking and picture-sharing websites. It has presentations of the key findings from studies of teenagers' use of the Internet by other teenagers and is integrated with an online helpline service from Childline. The website was promoted through a poster campaign in schools.

The importance of informing parents on internet safety is evident when one considers that the Webwise 2006 survey found that younger children are to a larger degree introduced to the Internet at home. Of those Children surveyed that had used the Internet; 60% of children will use the internet for the first time at home, 22% at school, 7% with friends, 2% in an internet café, 6% in other places (3% didn't know or failed to answer this questions). The National Parents Council Primary working with the NCTE has developed a seminar to take the mystery out of the Internet for parents and to give them the skills to engage with their children's online lives. The seminar gives a practical demonstration of the technologies and the websites young people are using. Participants hear young people talking about how they use the Internet, why it is attractive to them, and get an insight into children's main concerns about being online. Since its roll-out in September 2007, eighty seven schools have scheduled Internet safety seminars for parents.

The Schools Broadband Programme provides broadband internet access to Primary and Post Primary schools and includes Content Filtering as an integral part of the service. The Content Filtering service is designed to control the level of access from schools, via the broadband network, to the wider internet. No school is connected to the internet via the schools broadband network unless it has confirmed that an Internet Acceptable Usage Policy is in place and it has selected a Content Filtering option.