There has been a lot of discussion recently about internet censorship - see the BBC for an example. This made me think yet again about the censorship of the Internet which schools willingly participate in when they use filtering to block access to unsuitable sites.

I don’t suggest that we stop doing this. In our cultural and legal climate we have little choice and anyway few of us would want children to access some of the darker corners of the web.

However, because we filter we think that everything’s OK. It’s OK until the child goes home and then, in the majority of homes, Internet access is unfiltered and unsupervised and they have to deal with the ‘dark side’ alone.

We have to find a way of protecting children while still educating them in ways of avoiding the worst and dealing with it when it appears.

The new SQA Internet safety qualification  deals with many problematical aspects of internet use such as viruses, spyware, copyright, phishing, etc but does not (and could not) deal with what worries parents most - exposure to pornographic and violent imagery.

Apart from this obvious area, there is a great deal more that children require support with - divulging personal information online, combatting online bullying, separating the true from the fanciful and misleading, etc.

If schools can’t show children how to use the internet efficiently and safely, they will be putting children at risk because of this omission. We need to get to grips with this issue sooner rather than later.