Member News: St Christopher's CEO Jonathan Whalley’s Blog – Online Safety in Fostering

This month our Head of Development and Business Relationships – Andrew Lewis has taken over the blog to discuss our work on promoting online safety within fostering.

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Recently the inquest into the sad death of Molly Russell has rightly refocussed public attention onto the safeguarding need to support young people to stay safe online. At St Christopher’s we have continued to consider how we can make improvements to support our staff and foster carers to provide help and guidance to young people in navigating the digital world safely whilst still building their electronic life skills.

In September we submitted our final report on the fostering policy research we undertook supported by Nominet to examine the challenge of ‘Elevating young peoples’ voice to influence the services that impact on their digital safety and opportunity’. The project team worked closely in co-production with our young people, foster carers and staff in diverse method sessions to capture their lived experience of challenges that they had faced in the online space and how we can work better to understand and support each other’s virtual interactions. As an established charitable foster care provider we wanted to use this learning to enrich practice and decision making reflecting the complexity of young people’s needs; supporting them to develop online skills, and their natural adolescent development of identity safely in digital spaces. Entering into the co-production sessions for the project we knew that as young people are the experts in their own lives that their understanding would increase our safeguarding’ effectiveness. Young people’s and carers’ insights enabled us to better understand each other’s decision making, supporting less risky choices and better information sharing within foster homes.

Young people’s initial feedback for the project highlighted the need to explore the fairness and consistency of rules around online activity as well as methods of explaining appropriate boundaries in a more accessible manner. Young people told us about their curiosity regarding new online platforms and the strength of peer pressure to share personal information online. They identified age gaps in formal education systems when online safety is not discussed in appropriate detail. Their experiences show the need for this area of safeguarding to remain a vigilant focus for us and the wider sector.

We are now in a position to share our learning and our project team will be leading on presenting this at our Foster Carer conferences over the coming weeks.  The team have created a social media library and resource pack to enable carers to engage with and support young people in digital spaces with a wider understanding of current platforms. We are committed to exploring the use of our fostering support groups to enable carers’ continued shared learning of online safety and ongoing review of the social media library to ensure they remain relevant. Online resources have been developed for carers incorporating the co-production feedback that will help them facilitate fun learning activities with their respective foster children (such as structures for hosting safe online gaming groups). Perhaps most relevantly these session resources offer structures for carers and young people to explore online spaces together affording each other insight into their perceived risks and benefits of the internet, encouraging conversations at home.

As technology progresses into our lives ever further with each passing year, we anticipate that many new challenges (as well as fantastic opportunities), will emerge for our young people that require us to adapt as an organisation. I can confidently say that St Christopher’s as a 150-year-old charity is committed to responding resiliently to change through listening to and incorporating children and young people’s aspirations and lived experiences within the heart our practice.

Source:
www.stchris.org.uk

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