Welcome

Hello! Welcome to the July issue of your digital Connected Newsletter. This term we take a look at the Government's revised statutory guidance on Keeping Children Safe in Education, which comes into effect 5th September 2016 and we announce our new strategic partnership with e-safety expert Alan Mackenzie.

 

New partnership with E-safety expert
Alan Mackenzie

We are delighted to announce our new partnership with e-safety expert Alan Mackenzie who we will refer to for independent expert advice on online and e-safety issues.

For many years Alan was the e-safety lead at Lincolnshire County Council, raising initiatives across all schools, police, the voluntary sector and others with positive outcomes and a significant increase in e-safety awareness.

Working at the local authority allowed Alan to take a more strategic view of school needs, particularly in regards to policy, liabilities and the management of e-safety as a whole.

Alan has already spoken at a number of Schools Broadband e-safety workshops. He speaks with captivating passion and detailed knowledge of up  

Read more about Alan Mackenzie

to the minute issues surrounding online safety. His presentations are educational and thought provoking and he provides a wide array of useful reference material to help schools.

If you are interested in booking an event for schools in your area, please contact us on
01133 222 333.

 

Keeping Children Safe in Education. Revised statutory Guidance

In December 2015 the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, announced that all schools will be required to put in place strengthened measures to protect children from harm online, including cyber bullying, pornography and the risk of radicalisation.

Although schools have always provided filtered internet access, from 5th Sept. 2016 strengthened measures will need to be put in place.

Location based apps and on-line safety

Read this article to find out more

Your schools Broadband Lightspeed Systems filtering solution provides all the features you need for the strengthened measures. If your school requires individual reporting please refer to the article below.

 

Individual web filtering reporting

In relation to the Government’s Prevent Duty introduced last year, School’s Broadband cloud-hosted Lightspeed Systems service offers a compliant solution that can play a key part in helping to detect any suspicious online search activity.

Earlier last year universal changes made by Google impacted the filtering of search results and images by keyword. A solution was made available however it had some limitations meaning that individual reporting of Google searches was not possible. 

Please be advised that this limitation has been addressed and a full proxy solution is now available which allows individual reporting should you require this for your school.

If you would like us to work with you to implement the proxy solution, please contact Customer Technical Services:

Customer Technical Services: 01133 222 333

 

Investment in our Network

As part of our continual commitment to quality of service and catering for unprecedented bandwidth demand, Talk Straight has recently invested over half a million pounds in our infrastructure. Giving us more carrier diversity, more capacity and greater scalability. 

Read more...

 

Annual July Invoices

Some of you will be due your annual invoice on the 14th July. If this applies to you, we kindly ask that you arrange payment before the summer break.

If you could bring this to the attention of the person responsible for your accounts payable we would be most grateful.

Thank you.

 

Please ensure you have updated your records with our new address details: Talk Straight Ltd, Unit 2 - 4 Backstone Business Park, Dansk Way, Ilkley, LS29 8JZ.

We also updated our Ts and Cs in June.
Click to read

 

Good luck team Talk Straight

On Sunday 10th July ten of our Talk Straight/Schools Broadband team will be running the Jane Tomlinson Leeds 10K in aid of The British Heart Foundation. MD Dave, Bob, Luke, Mike, Sam,  Helena, Sallie, Haley G, Haley J and Jack have all been training hard. Thanks to the generosity of our staff and suppliers we are well on the way to achieving our £500 target! Donations can be made via the team's sponsorship page. Good luck to you all!
https://www.justgiving.com/…/Schools-Broadband-Talk-Straigh…

 

And Finally!

From all of us at Schools Broadband; Service Delivery, Customer Technical Services, Billing, The Network Operations team, your Account Managers, Marketing and the Board of Directors, we wish you all a well deserved happy and relaxing summer. See you in September!