My name is PC Hanne JORGENSEN, collar number 400582 of Bedfordshire Police. I work in a department called Education and Diversion. I have worked within Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire police for over 10 years. My current role is to prevent criminal behaviours in children and young people from being victims or offenders of crime.
I have been working with Weatherfield Academy for around 6 months. I can say from first-hand experience that the staff in this establishment go above and beyond every single day to ensure your children have the best possible chance in life. They are dedicated to safeguarding and supporting your child’s learning.
Recently, there have been some incidents that have caused serious concern to the school and police. The students are all extremely vulnerable, and whilst using social media, they can be exposed to lots of things that they should not be seeing or hearing.
The issues are continuing with unsupervised group chats happening outside of school, leading to conflicts coming back to school. This is causing anxiety and stress in the vulnerable young people involved. It is a serious disruption to the learning and development of the pupils within the school.
It is crucial that the school, police and parents are all working together to safeguard your vulnerable children from offending, being victims and protect their learning, supporting them to have the best possible chance at a comfortable and happy life.
I am more than happy to work with your family and see what support is available to you. The advice I have for parents of vulnerable young people who have unsupervised access to the internet is as follows:
You must have parental controls on all devices.
If you are trusting your children to use apps/platforms that require a higher age than their learning age (all social media is at least 13 years old), their devices need to be regularly checked by yourself to ensure there are no unhealthy groups with negative communication with other students in the school.
If your child is overriding the parental controls, their current device should be switched for an old-style phone like a flip phone.
For further advice and guidance, you can access this website: https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/online-safety-families-children-with-send/