Safer Internet Day 2025
Over the years, Safer Internet Day has become a landmark event in the online safety calendar. Starting as an initiative of the EU SafeBorders project in 2004 and then taken up by the Insafe network, Safer Internet Day has grown beyond its traditional geographic boarders and is now celebrated in approximately 170 countries worldwide.
Safer Internet Day 2025 will take place on the 11th of Feb, with celebrations and learning based around the theme ‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourself and others from scams online‘
Lead by the UK Safer Internet Centre, Safer Internet Day we will assess the real scale of this issue and allow young people to share their experiences and ideas on how to tackle the problem. Building on the important work being done to raise awareness of issues such as online financial sextortion and considering the future of scams.
The UK Safer Internet Centre has some excellent resouces, tips and advice for parents when handling this tricky area, such as;
Decide what’s right for your family
Creating a family agreement allows you to have conversations about setting boundaries. It’s important that you involve yourself in your child’s online world, so as a simple starting point you could ask them what their favourite websites or games are, and why they like them. The filtering options that you put in place may also change over time, as your children get older and more independent, and their technology use changes too.
Check your settings regularly
Children can become accomplished users of technology and may learn how to disable or bypass the parental controls in place. Therefore, it’s important to talk to your children from the outset about why the settings are there, and the importance of respecting them. Regularly checking the filtering on your family’s devices could also form part of your agreement.
Give children the skills they need
No parental controls or filtering options are guaranteed to be 100% effective. They are a very useful tool to improve the quality of online experiences, but they cannot offer a ‘complete’ solution. It is therefore essential to talk with your children about their online activities, so they know what to do if they encounter inappropriate content.
Establish some rules
If you have parental controls from your internet provider on your home WiFi, these will not cover the use of 3G, 4G or 5G at home. Similarly, if your child goes to a friend’s house where there are no controls in place, they may be able to access unrestricted content. For these reasons, it’s important to educate your child about the potential risks online and establish rules concerning the sites that are suitable or inappropriate to visit.
We want to help tech children to enjoy and respect technology, and we cover safe internet practices as part of our workshops as standard. Let’s all work together to make the internet a safer place for all our young people.