Smoothwall Partners With Safeguard Software To Safeguard Children

The Leeds-based online safeguarding solutions provider, Smoothwall, has recently announced that they will be entering a new partnership with Safeguard Software to help ensure protection to children in all aspects of school life.

This is an industry first, this partnership combines Smoothwall’s Visigo capabilities, which enables real-time monitoring of children’s online and digital activities, with Safeguard Software’s digital record of behaviours and events of individual students.

Both companies have worked together for the past year and both of them share a common goal, to provide schools with a better understanding, context and insight into each child’s life. Testimonies from teachers about any ongoing issues the children may be having in the physical realm, such as bullying, issues occurring in the playground or at home can now be cross-referenced with what they are talking about when they’re looking online. This will result in the school being able to attain a definitive timeline and source of truth for the students in one place, presenting a unique perspective of each child.

Douglas Hanley, the CTO at Smoothwall commented on their new partnership:

“This partnership is extremely important to the work we do at Smoothwall in safeguarding children. Ensuring schools and social services have all the information they need to make informed intervention decisions is critical.

“Previously, schools would log any incidents in either books or excel sheets which would sit in separate silos to any online monitoring information they had on students. This created a disjointed picture. However, by combining all the information that Smoothwall’s software detects and integrating it with Safeguard Software, schools will be able to create a much richer, joined-up and contextually informed picture of each student, raising any red flags when necessary.”

The Director of Safeguard Software, Steven Morrissey also commented:

“Although government legislation requires schools to have the appropriate digital monitoring tools in place, until now, there has been no way to join the dots between what happens with a child in the online world with the real world. With this partnership, our mission is to complete the puzzle and create a central platform for schools to record all of their safeguarding concerns – the first step in keeping them safe.”