“How do we balance competing filtering/censorship requests from different teachers in the same establishment who have different social/moral/religious/political values?” This is the big question for me. It would be a mistake, I think, to try to meet all objections on social/moral/religious/political grounds, since we would end up offering a bland concoction to our young people. They would, rightly, vote with their feet.

When we apply filtering in schools, what are we protecting? We are protecting children from inadvertantly accessing content which is inappropriate and we are protecting schools and local authorities from litigation for failing in their duty of care. We are also stopping children from seeing materials which teachers say they should not see. How do we balance competing filtering/censorship requests from different teachers in the same establishment who have different social/moral/religious/political values?

There is much scope for lengthy debate about what is or is not appropriate.

The filters will stop some children from deliberately accessing sexually explicit or violent materials, but no filter can be 100% effective. Where we do have instances of children accessing such material deliberately in school, it raises the question as to what they are supposed to be doing, and who is supervising them?

In some ways, dealing with sex and violence is relatively easy, because in our cultural framework there is no great argument as to whether these things should be blocked.

The difficulty occurs when we are asked to block other types of sites which teachers deem inappropriate. The two most frequent types of sites which fall into these categories are games sites and social software sites. Both types of sites have obvious educational potential, so why do teachers ask to have them banned? In my experience there are two main reasons: the first is the “time wasting” element – pupils will spend huge amounts of time on, or trying to get on, these sites; the second reason is that teachers are uncomfortable with much of the content on some of these sites – the txt spk, “bad taste” videos, modern music, chat rooms, online dating etc etc Teachers do have genuinely held fears over the safety of such social software sites, but there are also teachers who have a fear of the unknown or the uncontrollable. I wonder how many teachers have ever visited My Space or YouTube (both of which have received huge media coverage recently but which are on the blocked list in some of our schools).

As adults, we have always had a problem understanding youth culture. My parents and teachers certainly didn’t understand my world and now I find myself asking my teenage son “do you call that music?”. I wonder if the generation gap is growing larger now that young people live in a “virtual” world and communicate using tools adults barely know exist, let alone understand.

Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps when a teacher requests a site be blocked, the question could be asked “What are you offering in your classroom which is more interesting, engaging, enjoyable and relevant?”

Unfortunately, this is a difficult issue which has many shades of grey and doesn’t simplify easily.

As Andy suggests, I suspect the answer lies in understanding the online world in which we now live and redressing the imbalance in understanding between teachers and pupils which currently exists.