Safeguarding Children and Teams

[MrsNolan]

With the need to do distance learning and teaching, I want to encourage our school to make the most of MS Teams, however I keep being told that there is a safeguarding issue.  No one has been specific with what the perceived issue is as yet.  The way I see it, Teams would be a perfect way to manage live classes and provide feedback as we go.  Great for book scrutinise, where SLT can just log on and take a look inside the appropriate Class Team. 

Reading previous posts (2018) I see that there was an issue that students could create their own teams, is  assume this still an issue that needs to be resolved at the Azure AD - however is it a time consuming process (with 1500 students and a busy IT department) as I want to remove as many barriers as I can.  

[#2]

@MrsNolan 

There aren't many routes to an effective team setup that don't involve a time consuming process. There are quite a lot of features that you can configure that overcome most safeguarding issues.

You can use the teams policies in the admin center to disable messaging and video calling for students:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/teams-policies

You can disable Teams creation and make it so that only certain people can create groups:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/create-groups/manage-creation-of-groups?view=o3...

Would be good to know your SLT's specific concerns so that I can be of more help in addressing them.

[#3]

@Rhys Williams  Thank you for your links and details.  I am struggling to get to the bottom of specific concerns, I agree if I had these details I could be more targeted with my question and thus our communities answers.  However saying that, the two issues you have addressed seem to be the most common - using video and creating teams, so hopefully your answer will help others and defuse any of our team's concerns.

Thank you once again.  If I get any further insight I will be sure to share.

Regards

Mrs Nolan

[#4]

Hi MrsNolan, I'm aware this is a slightly older post, but senso.cloud have worked closely with Microsoft to create a Microsoft Teams Chat monitoring solution which scans chats and images uploaded for appropriate material. This works wherever Teams is used, whether on the students device at home or in school in app, phone or browser.