Dear parents/carers of children in Year 5 and Year 6,
It has come to my attention that a number of children are communicating via various social media platforms, unsupervised. As a result, there have been instances where inappropriate messages have been exchanged, resulting in pupils feeling hurt and upset.
Please be mindful that you are responsible for the devices your child has access to and the content they are accessing. There are very clear guidelines about the minimum age for children to access social media platforms and you may be interested or even surprised to know that this is as follows;
TikTok – 13 years and older
Snapchat – 13 years and older
WhatsApp – 16 years and older.
Your child is well below the age of this guidance and as such if you are allowing your child to use these then you must be monitoring what they are doing. It is your parental responsibility to keep your child safe online. My recommendation is that your child should not be accessing these social media platforms until you are confident that they are responsible enough to do so appropriately and that they know what to do if they feel they are at risk.
However, if your child is 10 years old they are the age of Criminal Responsibility and as such they are responsible for their behaviour. Using social media in the wrong way, sending hurtful and offensive messages can be interpreted as ‘Hate Crime’ and ‘Peer on Peer Abuse’ and is therefore evidence of a potential offence. The school uses the authority it has to discipline beyond the school gates and any child who is taking part in inappropriate use of social media may be excluded from our school in line with our Safeguarding & Child Protection Procedures and our Pupil Behaviour and Discipline Policy (both of which, along with our Online Safety Policy and our Anti-Bullying Policy are available on our school website at www.devonshirehill.com).
Should there be any further incidents reported to the school, we will make arrangements for the Police support service to speak to the children about the consequences of inappropriate use of social media. This includes messaging each other across social media such as TikTok, Snapchat and WhatsApp and using offensive, discriminatory and derogatory language. Sadly we have evidence of this happening and of the negative impact this is having in school.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Yours sincerely ,
Julie D’Abreu
Headteacher
