Anyone who works with teenagers will know how important it is to them that they stay connected. Without their mobile phones, many will tell you that they feel lost, anxious and even fearful.

To those of us who can remember a time before social media, that level of attachment can seem excessive and a cause for concern. But for young people, this is simply their way of life. Clearly, there is now a chasm of experience that exists between us and those we teach, which makes it difficult to know how best to approach teaching them about staying safe online.

Yet there is actually an obvious solution to this: join forces with the people that we are trying to protect.

I have been head of PSHE at Hampton School, an all-boys’ day school in West London, for seven years now. Online safety is under my remit, but, like many of my colleagues, I found that I was struggling to keep pace with all the latest developments in the technology pupils were using.

Then, two years ago, we brought in an agency to conduct an e-safety audit of the school. They encouraged us to engage pupils in e-safety and, as a result, we created a “pupil digital ambassador” programme.

We launched our digital ambassador programme with a special morning of workshops. Volunteers from every year group came forward, and the session started with the pupils discussing what they felt a digital ambassador’s role should include. Together, we decided that the role should have two main objectives: to make sure that e-safety lessons stayed relevant and that the lessons were also engaging.

The boys split into smaller groups to discuss the different issues facing pupils of their age online. They then presented their thoughts and discussed how we could best address these issues. By the end of the morning, we had a plan to move forward with.

We arranged to hold a weekly meeting with the new digital ambassadors, a member of the senior management team and myself. It was important to demonstrate to the boys that there was engagement from those in leadership and that their views were valued. In the initial meetings, we continued to gather pupils’ input on the issues they face and also began to put some of their solutions into action.

For example, we learned that younger pupils would benefit from more information on “stranger danger” and the risk that people online might not be who they claim to be. Our young ambassadors created a set of short films to help educate their classmates on this.

Sixth-form ambassadors, meanwhile, raised concerns about the impact that spending a lot of time online could have on mental health and the risk of replacing real relationships with virtual ones. As a result, we have adapted our PSHE programme to address these issues.

‘Like the Wild West’

One theme that ran through our discussions with all of the year groups was the concern that some parents were not equipped to offer practical help. A phrase that I’ve heard used about the online world is that “it is like the Wild West without a sheriff”. I think this is how our children sometimes view it: while the sense of freedom can feel exciting, it is also something that they are worried by. Our pupils expressed feelings of abandonment in what appears to be a lawless world, when they wanted to be able to turn to their parents for help.

In response to this, our first-year ambassadors helped to arrange an evening of e-safety education for their parents, while our third-year ambassadors made a video in which they asked their parents for guidance and support with social media. In order for parents to learn on their own, we’ve also set up an online education programme with the support of the social enterprise Parentzone.

One of the challenges, however, has been keeping the initiative going. These initial interventions have been very successful and our e-safety approach is now much better, but once their initial ideas had been brought to fruition, there was a feeling among a few of the ambassadors that their job was done.

This year, I would like to give them more of a presence in school by having them deliver an assembly to their peers. I am also hoping to take them out of school on a trip to a tech company headquarters in order to keep them excited about and committed to the valuable role that they play.

By working in partnership with students, we can give them the tools to safely make the most of the amazing digital world.

Jack Talman is head of PSHE at Hampton School in London.

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