Many thanks to those parents and carers who joined the webinare with TrustElevate on Thursday 12th July. This was connected to government funded trials to help develop age verification and parental control systems that could help children be safer online. This is part of the wider government initiative, outlined in the On Line Harms White Paper, to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online.

The TrustElevate team has been working with schools in developing their child online safety solution. Children’s online safety is a massive concern, especially as we come up to the summer holidays, during which time children are expected to spend more time than usual online. TrustElevate’s founder Dr Rachel O’Connell’s PhD examined paedophile activity online and the implications for investigative strategies. After working with enforcement agencies, she came up with a solution to protect children online before they encountered risk. TrustElevate is a Child Age Verification and Parental Consent provider: it enables the checking of children’s ages to prevent their online contact with adults with a sexual interest in children and facilitate the provision, denial or revocation of parental consent for data processing – in line with GDPR and other major regulations. This solution has been trialled as part of a Home Office & DCMS programme of work and was found to be desirable, proportionate and feasible.  Whilst the programme is not endorsed by Highgate Wood School, we do wish to lend our support to this initiative which helps raise the profile of online safety and also, potentially, provides a much-need solution to age verification online. Trustelevate see it as a unique opportunity for parents to join the trials and provide feedback before the technology goes live in early 2022. It will be free for parents, children and schools and so your feedback is vital to understand perspective on this new service.

For those who were unable to join the webinar, a recording is available below.  More information is available at: https://www.trustelevate.com/parents and a 1-minute video that TrustElevat has created for parents is available here: https://youtu.be/t_IYNO9x9eY

For more information please email esafe@hws.haringey.sch.uk