INTERVIEW WITH YASMIN LONDON

NSW PPA Vision: To empower school leaders by delivering quality professional learning

How does ySafe educate and raise awareness about cyber safety?

"We are extremely proud to be able to support schools in a variety of ways. We predominantly work by providing education to all year groups, from K- 12, as well as providing personal development and education resources for staff and parents. Our approach is rooted in the belief that every person in the school community should receive the education and support they need, and that the delivery of services should be executed with a whole of school approach."

"In addition to working directly with schools, we also forge partnerships with industry bodies such as the NSWPPA and the Anglican Schools Commission, to deliver education and digital wellbeing solutions at scale. One partnership we are particularly excited about is our collaboration with Macquarie Bank (one of our commercial partners). Through this collaboration, we are now able to level the playing field for regional and remote communities because Macquarie Bank is subsidising free access to our Digital Experts Academy Program, for 250 regional or remote school communities. This gamified online learning platform is run in the classroom by teachers and focuses on developing students' social and emotional learning (SEL) capabilities. The skills learned through the DX are applicable to both in-person and online environments, and are now available for the first 250 schools to sign up."

What are some emerging cyber threats across Australia?

"Cyberbullying and a subset behaviour of that known as Cyberostracism (where kids are intentionally or maliciously left out of online situations) are always prevalent. Especially after the experience of COVID which left a lot of young people feeling anxious and sensitive about the state of the world. We have schools still dealing with weekend activities spilling into the school yard, and parent expectations about solving peer to peer issues that are occuring online. We are also sadly seeing the increase of predation and sextortion style scams victimising kids at younger and younger ages (particularly boys right now), and the rise of misinformation and deep fake technology which can be problematic when used for the wrong purposes."

What steps do ySafe take to stay up to date with these emerging threats?

"We have a team of researchers, content writers and staff members from a varied mix of professional disciplines like clinical psychologists, ex law enforcement officers and education and technology experts. We all collaborate with industry bodies like the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, and pay attention to the latest research coming out of groups like the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, NCMEC, the World Health Organisation and other important voices in education and online safety to ensure we have the latest, evidence based information and strategies to help our schools."

How does ySafe collaborate with organisations?

"We are big believers in diversity when it comes to education, and that different voices reinforcing the right messages for our audiences is imperative. We therefore work with other online safety and child wellbeing experts and refer work, we sit on round tables and share our learnings so that schools and students can be the ultimate beneficiaries of that shared knowledge and expertise. There is no one size fits all approach, or one person or organisation that has all the answers all the time. It's about a community lead, collaborative and intentional approach by an industry that understands how to create impact, and yield the best educational outcomes for our kids and communities."

What are some of ySafe future initiatives?

Are you a regional/remote school and interested in our Digital Experts Academy?

"We always have a lot of projects on the boil, however I'm most looking forward to working with the NSW Primary Principals Association to help guide students, schools, teachers or school leaders in improving their online safety practices, and to empower their school communities to thrive in online environments."

Yasmin has a scheduled webinars for Principals and school leaders on Tuesday the 8th August at 8am - 9am in Term 3, and Tuesday the 14th November from 8am9am in Term 4. Yasmin and the team at ySafe by Linewize are also preparing to release the Digital Experts Academy Program for Principals commencing in 2024.

Please reach out to djanetzki@nswppa.org.au to sign up.

@nswppa