Submission to the consultation on updating the Education Act
How the Act could better support young people, schools and their wider communities to create safer and more secure digital learning environments
Netsafe has made a submission to the consultation on the update of the Education Act. This responds to the questions set out in the Ministry of Education’s public discussion document Have your say about Updating the Education Act 1989 (PDF). Netsafe’s focus in making this submission was on how the Act could better support young people, schools and their wider communities to create safer and more secure digital learning environments.
Suggestions provide in Netsafe’s feedback include the:
- Goals for education to explicitly include the role of digital technologies in learning and teaching and in relation to young people’s well being.
- Role of boards to include adopting an active and ongoing risk management approach for online safety and security.
- Extension of boards’ responsibilities to provide a safe physical and emotional environment for students and staff to explicitly include digital/virtual environments.
- Improvement of national data collection and sharing in strategic priority areas such as tackling bullying.
- Implementation of specific digital safety and security indicators for schools during a period of rapid uptake of digital technology across the system.
Netsafe’s submission can be read in full here: NetSafe’s submission to the consultation on updating the Education Act (Dec 2015, PDF, 275Kb)
