An e-Safety awareness raising event was held for teaching and support staff from Westways Primary School, followed up by a Parents Evening.

The theme addressed the wealth of new technologies and tools available for today's children (including the world wide web, mobile phones and other hand-held devices, instant messaging, social networking sites like Facebook and Bebo etc) and how they allow endless possibilities for learning about the world and improving their communication skills.

However there are potential dangers where youngsters can inadvertently find inappropriate material or people are not who they say they are.

The sessions looked in more detail at these dangers, as raised by experts at the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, as well as

• usage figures generated by a survey of the whole of Key Stage 2
• national data
• ways of working with children to make them feel more comfortable about sharing any incidents with parents or carers
• how to report abuse

Here are a few of the excellent websites containing more information, resources and educational interactive games to help with these issues: