Your right to be safe and secure online: Secondary

Overview

Audience

Secondary (ages 11 to 16)

Timing

60 minutes

Learning outcomes

Learners will be able to:

• identify how their rights apply online
• explore the challenges around exercising their rights online
• suggest strategies for exercising their rights and how to challenge violations

Key vocabulary

Laws, legality, rights, responsibilities, uphold, respect, violate, support, protection, anonymous, anonymity, strategies, ethics, principles, conflict of interests

Resources

PowerPoint slides, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) symbols resource and overview poster

Preparation

• Read through the ‘An educational practitioner’s guide to children’s rights online’. This gives a clear understanding of the area and ensures you’re familiar with your school’s safeguarding policy, as well as the Wales Safeguarding Procedures in the event of a disclosure or concerns about a learner’s safety or wellbeing. For more information, see the statutory guidance ‘Keeping learners safe’.
• Print out the UNCRC overview poster – one copy per pair/small group.
• Print copies of the online scenarios on slides 9 to 12 of the PowerPoint presentation – one set per pair/small group.

Curriculum links

This resource supports activities delivered as part of the Health and Well-being Area of Learning and Experience.

Key questions (to use as discussion starters or prompts)

• What are your rights? How do you know what they are?
• Who is responsible for upholding your rights online?
• Which rights apply to your online use and experiences?
• What laws do you know of that can protect you online?
• Does the internet ever create a conflict of interests for upholding human rights/children’s rights? Why might this be? How would you decide which right was more important?
• What strategies could you use to exercise your rights?
• What could you do if you felt your rights were being violated online, or you were being treated unfairly?
• Who could you turn to for help with online issues related to your rights or your safety?

Starter activity (10 minutes)

Using the accompanying PowerPoint slides for this lesson plan, start by asking learners:

• What are your rights? How do you know what they are?

Then, based on the UNCRC overview poster, briefly explain the rights to learners and invite them to ask any questions about Articles they think are unclear.

Ask learners ‘Who upholds your rights?’. Slide 5 gives examples of people/groups responsible for protecting and upholding children’s rights online and offline. Remind learners they also have a role to play in exercising their rights and supporting the rights of other young people.

Activity 1: What are my rights online? (15 minutes)

Working in pairs or small groups, ask learners to consider which of their rights they feel are important online. They should record these by copying and completing the table on slide 7, including the Article number and providing a short description.

They should then provide an example of something they do, or use online, that helps uphold that right, for example Article 16 covers the right to privacy. Using privacy or account settings to limit who can contact you or see your information in online profiles is one way to uphold this right on games and apps they enjoy using.

Encourage learners to feed back their ideas to the class and see if other learners agree/disagree. Invite learners to share their examples of how these rights can be upheld online. Also explain that all UNCRC Articles apply online, but that some are more relevant than others.

Activity 2: Are all rights equal online? (30 minutes)

This activity requires small groups of learners to discuss different online scenarios where upholding children’s (and human) rights come into conflict.

Explain to learners that they will consider where different rights come into conflict. Ask learners to weigh up the benefits and risks of the associated rights and decide which right should be prioritised or upheld, even if it is at the expense of another right. Learners should also consider whether children’s rights carry greater weight than the human rights of adults in some circumstances.

Provide each group with a set of scenarios (slides 9 to 12). As a starting point, you could allocate a different scenario to each group to ensure all are explored. After they have fully discussed their scenario, groups could choose another one to repeat the process.

Groups have 15 minutes to come to a conclusion. To help start the discussions, direct learners to look again at the UNCRC and decide which rights apply to their chosen scenario – and decide which right carries the greatest weight/importance. Learners may wish to then consider further examples or scenarios to help work out whether one right is more relevant in the majority of instances, or just in particular contexts.

If learners are finding this activity challenging, slide 13 contains a list of prompt questions and themes that might help start a discussion. Slide 14 contains a table of suggested Articles that could relate to each scenario. This could be shared with learners to help them identify the issues that each scenario might present.

Once the group have reached an agreement, they should write down some notes to summarise their discussion and decision, and any suggestions that may resolve the issue.

After 15 minutes, bring the class back together and ask each group to read out their scenario, followed by their thinking and conclusions about which right should be upheld. Invite other learners to respond with their thoughts and ideas.

To close the activity, show learners slide 15 and ask them what steps they could take if they felt their rights were being violated online. Share some suggested strategies and also explain the role of the Children’s Commissioner for Wales and the Investigation and Advice service it offers.

Plenary (5 minutes)

Remind learners that using technology and the internet should be a positive experience. If they’re worried about any online behaviour towards themselves or others, they should always seek help. Take a few minutes to discuss who they would turn to, in and out of school. This helpful article from Meic is useful in guiding this discussion.

Remind learners that they can also contact Meic, which offers free information, advocacy and advice for children and young people in Wales up to the age of 25. Call Meic for free on 080880 23456, text on 84001 or send instant messages at www.meic.cymru. The service is open from 8a.m. to midnight, 7 days a week.

Opportunities to extend the learning

Promoting rights

Explore with learners some different ways that they could raise awareness of children’s rights online with other learners. This could involve developing an awareness campaign, running an assembly or lesson for others, or developing and launching a peer-mentoring scheme to help others understand and exercise their rights online.

Keeping safe online

The lesson can be used as a springboard into additional learning about issues such as privacy and data or online hate.

Online Safety Bill

When considering legality and safety, some learners may find it useful to look at the draft UK Online Safety Bill to further understand the planned measures to protect children’s rights online in the UK. Given the complexity of the Bill, you may wish to direct learners towards this BBC article, or other online news sources about the Bill. The Bill, in itself, could form the basis of a discussion/debate session on the balance between rights and protection that could be an interesting exercise in its own right.