Overview

Smoothwall are market leaders in UK Education and currently protect more than 7000 schools with our intelligent, real-time content aware web filter. In September 2016, the Department for Education released new guidelines addressing the need for schools and colleges to have appropriate filtering and monitoring in place. Smoothwall can proudly acknowledge that our web filtering solution not only meets all the requirements set out in the guidelines that have been put together by the UK Government and the UK Safer Internet Centre, but also exceeds it when taking into consideration our unique safeguarding reporting suite, which is unrivalled by any other provider. Smoothwall offers a specialist suite of safeguarding tools which analyses online activity and categorises it into one of seven rulesets; radicalisation, suicide, abuse, substance abuse, bullying, criminal activity and adult content. These are then ranked by a scoring system in terms of the level of risk, and fit into one of three groups; advisory, caution or danger. These reports are designed to show the intent of the online activity, ie. is an inappropriate search term a one off occurrence or is it grouped with other actions showing a pattern of behaviour. This tool generates alerts and reports which can be provided to the safeguarding officer to take appropriate action, and can be viewed as active monitoring. On top of this, Smoothwall provides filtering and reporting for over 100 categories, including all those recognised by the new DfE guidelines, including discrimination, drugs / substance abuse, extremism, malware / hacking, pornography, privacy / copyright theft, self harm and violence. Further to this, our web filter has the functionality to support all the following principles outlined by the UK Safer internet centre; age appropriate differentiation, control, filtering policies, identification, mobile and app content, multiple language support and reporting.