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BACK-TO-SCHOOL: IS YOUR WEB FILTERING COMPLIANT?

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Recent legislation aims to ensure that all schools have the most appropriate filtering and monitoring solutions required to successfully safeguard and promote the welfare of children in your care.

The KCSiE legislation from the Department for Education sheds light on the fact that as part of a digital age, we want young people to understand, learn from and utilise the internet as a key element of their education, as it is such a large part of our culture. Due to this, ‘overblocking of web content’, is no longer something that is sustainable or effective within education. Schools now need to focus on tools that enable them to block inappropriate content in real time, without relying on URL blocklists alone, while still allowing access to educational and appropriate social content.

With ever increasing demands and expectations to perform against Ofsted’s framework, it is key to understand the reasons why new legislation has been brought into place. As young people are growing up in a d…
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ACHIEVING ECONOMIES OF SCALE WHEN JOINING A MULTI-ACADEMY TRUST

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Earlier this year, the government back-tracked on controversial plans to ensure every state school converted to having an academy status by 2022. However, even with the news of this U-turn, schools converting to an academy and joining Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) has not slowed.
There’s been a significant growth in the amount of schools joining Multi Academy Trusts over the past five years. According to a report by the House of Commons Education Committee, in 2011, there were 391 MATs. As of November 2016, that number ballooned to 4,140.
This number is expected to rise as MATs become the preferred model in education, as the Government has indicated that in five to six years, most schools will have converted to an academy or joined a MAT.
Whilst joining or forming a MAT seems like the sensible solution to improving teaching and learning quality, there’s still considerations that need to be addressed before jumping in with both feet. When becoming a part of a MAT, achieving economies of…
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The growing problem of Internet “link rot” and best practices for media and online publishers

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The Internet is an endlessly rich world of sites, pages and posts — until it all ends with a click and a “404 page not found” error message. While the hyperlink was conceived in the 1960s, it came into its own with the HTML protocol in 1991, and there’s no doubt that the first broken link soon followed.


On its surface, the problem is simple: A once-working URL is now a goner. The root cause can be any of a half-dozen things, however, and sometimes more: Content could have been renamed, moved or deleted, or an entire site could have evaporated. Across the Web, the content, design and infrastructure of millions of sites are constantly evolving, and while that’s generally good for users and the Web ecosystem as a whole, it’s bad for existing links. In its own way, the Web is also a very literal-minded creature, and all it takes is a single-character change in a URL to break a link. For example, many sites have stopped using “www,” and even if their content remains the same, the original …
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