Every year, Childnet speaks to thousands of young people in schools and settings across the country (and sometimes in other countries too)! These visits are the foundation of everything we do at Childnet, where we aim to make the internet a great and safe place for all children and young people. Not only do we get to travel around the country, meeting young people from a huge variety of places, but we get to learn from everyone we meet.
In this blog, we’ll look back over the last year of visits, and forward to what we have coming up next year.
What are Childnet Education visits?
At Childnet, we deliver education sessions to children between the ages of three to eighteen, as well as to school staff and to parents and carers.
Our education sessions for young people are most often delivered in the form of interactive assemblies. A member of the Childnet Education team will work through an on-screen presentation, often using scenarios and discussion prompts for older children, and songs and shorter games for younger children to help keep the session as interactive as possible!
Each session covers a range of different topics, and we work hard to make sure that these are relevant, engaging, and appropriate for children in every setting. Depending on our audience, we might talk about anything from online reliability, to online friendship, to consent and relationships online.
Where have we been this year?
One of the best parts about our education visits is the variety of places we get to visit every year! Even though this sometimes means battling train cancellations, spending a lot of time in station coffee shops, and getting very familiar with the London Underground, we are always determined to reach schools in every corner of the country. Lovely school visits can even make being stuck at Basingstoke station for two hours seem completely worthwhile.
This academic year, we’ve been all around the country, to other countries, and to a whole range of different educational settings. We’ve delivered bespoke sessions for learners with a wide range of special educational needs and differences, in-person and virtual sessions for schools in France, Bucharest, and Geneva, and a number of ‘lunch and learn’ sessions for conferences and businesses.
When delivering for different settings and audiences, we always work hard to create relevant and useful presentations. This can include pulling activities from some of our already existing resources, or creating entirely new content.
What have we learned from our visits?
The education team at Childnet spend a lot of time in schools and educational settings across the country, which means we get to hear about life online straight from children and young people. It also means we get to hear and experience some strange, unexpected, and sometimes hilarious things! From four-year-olds proposing in sessions to spontaneous dance moves, and even delivering sessions to hoards of witches and wizards on Halloween, we really have seen it all.
This year, we’ve been learning about popular new games and trends, like Palworld and BookTok, and hearing their perspectives on more serious issues, like online bullying, online sexual harassment, and financial ‘sextortion’, an emerging risk that led to the creation of our newest advice pages for adults and young people.
Listening to young people is really important to us at Childnet. As well as advice pages and blog posts, we often use these conversations to create resources that are led by young people and their needs, like our Reliability Online interactive resource, which was created with our Youth Advisory Board to help young people decide what they can trust when they’re online.
What are we looking forward to next year?
Our team have already started taking bookings for educational visits in the next academic year, and we’re really looking forward to returning to schools and settings that book us for yearly sessions, and helping them continue to develop their learners’ understanding of online safety. We’re also looking forward to expanding the schools we work with, the topics we discuss in sessions, and hearing loads more from young people navigating the online world!
Whether it’s small sessions with youth groups or sessions with entire year groups in schools across this country and others, we’re so excited to build relationships with new schools and settings. This gives us a chance to meet new young people, learn from their lived experiences, and developing resources and presentations that will really help to make a difference.
For more information about visits from the Education Team, visit the Childnet website or submit our online enquiry form if you’d like to make a booking.
