Two different jobs, often confused as one
Filtering and monitoring get talked about as a single thing, but they do genuinely different jobs.
Filtering is preventative. It stops students and staff reaching illegal, inappropriate or potentially harmful content in the first place, by blocking specific sites and content.
Monitoring is reactive. It doesn’t stop anyone doing anything. It watches what’s happening on school devices and flags activity that needs a closer look, whether that’s a teacher glancing round a classroom or software watching for concerning search terms.
Schools have a statutory duty to have both in place, set out in Keeping Children Safe in Education. The DfE’s own standard translates that duty into something you can actually check yourself against.
What the standard actually asks
Stripped of the jargon, the filtering and monitoring standard expects four things.
Clear ownership
A named member of your SLT and a governor should be responsible for making sure the standard is met, working closely with your designated safeguarding lead and IT support. Day-to-day, your DSL leads on the safeguarding side and IT support leads on the technical side, but neither can do this well in isolation from the other.
An annual review, at minimum
Your filtering and monitoring provision should be reviewed at least once every academic year, and sooner if there’s a safeguarding incident, a change in how technology is used (bring-your-own-device, for instance), or new tools like generative AI are introduced.
Filtering that blocks the right things, without blocking the wrong ones
Your provider needs to be signed up to the Internet Watch Foundation and the Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit blocklists, and those blocklists can’t be switched off or altered by anyone, including your own IT support. At the same time, filtering shouldn’t unreasonably get in the way of teaching, so most schools need different profiles for different user groups rather than one blanket setting for everyone.
Monitoring that catches things promptly
As a minimum, that means weekly reports, with immediate alerts for anything high-risk. Devices being monitored should also make that clear to the person using them.
Why this one deserves more than a box-tick
It’s tempting to treat filtering and monitoring as something you buy once and forget about. The standard is deliberately built to stop that happening, because a filtering system that hasn’t been reviewed since it was installed is very unlikely to still match how your school actually uses technology today, especially with how quickly things like AI tools are showing up in classrooms.
The annual review is really the heart of the standard. It’s your chance to ask honestly: does our current filtering reflect how our students actually use devices now? Are we picking up the right things in monitoring, without drowning staff in alerts that don’t matter? Skip it, and the practical risk is simple: a safeguarding concern gets missed because the system was set up for how students used devices two years ago, not how they use them now.
Where we’d suggest starting
If you haven’t reviewed your filtering and monitoring provision in the last twelve months, that’s the first job, not a new system. Most of the time, the existing setup is closer to right than people expect, it just needs the checks made and documented.
From there, we’d look at:
- Confirming your provider is on the IWF and CTIRU blocklists, and that this can’t be switched off locally.
- Checking that unmanaged devices (personal phones, guest laptops) sit on a separate network from school-managed ones.
- Making sure monitoring reports are actually being read weekly, not just generated.
- Testing what your filtering blocks using a tool like the one provided by South West Grid for Learning, so you know rather than assume.
Our approach
We don’t come into a filtering and monitoring review looking for reasons to sell you a new system. Most schools already have decent provision in place, it’s the ongoing management around it that slips. We’d rather tell you that honestly and help you tighten what’s there, than recommend a rebuild that wasn’t needed.
Guidance referenced is current as of August 2026. Always check GOV.UK for the latest version.
TL;DR: Filtering blocks harmful content before it’s reached; monitoring flags concerning activity after the fact, and schools need both. The DfE standard asks for named ownership (SLT and a governor), an annual review at minimum, filtering tied to IWF/CTIRU blocklists that can’t be switched off, and monitoring with at least weekly reporting. Most schools’ biggest gap is the review, not the technology.
