The Department for Education’s Filtering and Monitoring Standards for Schools and Colleges were updated in October 2024 to reflect the changing digital landscape and provide greater clarity on some key issues.

In a nutshell, the standards are:

1. Identify and assign roles and responsibilities to manage your filtering and monitoring systems

2. Review your filtering and monitoring provision at least annually

3. Filtering systems should block harmful and inappropriate content, without unreasonably impacting teaching and learning

4. Have effective monitoring strategies that meet the safeguarding needs of your school or college

To help you get to grips with the changes to the standards and know how to meet them, we have created an in-depth guide. The guide has been created to help schools, colleges and MATs understand clearly how they should implement filtering and monitoring. It outlines the standards that organisations should already be meeting, a summary of the changes, and how to respond accordingly.