Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)
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Question 147: To ask the Minister for Education and Science if, in view of the widespread and growing use of the Internet in domestic homes, she proposes to take action to ensure that children and their parents or guardians are aware of the potential and the dangers of Internet access; if she has a strategy in place to educate children through the school system about the Internet and the necessity for an awareness; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [6067/08]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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I launched Webwise, the internet safety initiative which was developed by the National Centre for Technology in Education 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 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 on-line helpline service from Childline. The website was promoted through a poster campaign in schools.

The NCTE has worked in collaboration with the Social Personal and Health Education (SPHE) Support Service to create the Internet Safety teaching and learning programme, Be SAFE_Be WEBWISE. This programme, which is the first educational programme of its kind in Europe, is designed to address the personal safety needs of our young people when on-line and to help them become safe and responsible Internet users for life. The programme consists of a Teachers' Internet Safety Lesson and Resource Pack for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Year Junior Certificate SPHE classes and in-service training for SPHE teachers.

Working with the National Parents Council (Primary) 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 on-line lives. So far over 40 tutors have been trained to deliver this seminar and over 100 schools have applied to avail of the initiative.

The NCTE's Teaching Skills Initiative offers a range of Internet safety courses for both primary and post-primary teachers. These courses provide teachers with advice and strategies for developing safe approaches to teaching and learning while using the Internet and give teachers' practical experience in taking internet safety precautions.

The Internet Advisory Board, of which the NCTE is a member, has produced two booklets on internet safety. My colleague the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr. Brian Lenihan T.D. launched last Monday 18th February their new publication 'Get with IT — A parents' guide to social-networking websites'. This launch took place in conjunction with the makeITsecure 2008 campaign, the aim of which is to drive awareness among citizens of the most common security risks related to accessing and transacting on the internet.

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.