At Notre Dame we believe that it is better to teach students how to use computers and the internet responsibly, rather than locking the whole thing down so that they have hardly any freedom at all.

We remind all our students of our Acceptable Use Policy at the begining of the year.  It explains to them that they are visitors to our network and therefore must agree to follow certain rules. 

We openly explain how our filtering and monitoring software works and that the ICT Dept have the right to look at anything students create or store on our network (including school email).

Once a week our ICT support team write notes to students who we suspect have broken the AUP to summon them to an interview with a member of the ICT Dept.  We ask each student to explain the issue.  If they are guilty of breaking the AUP, we follow a list of sanctions.  We also record the event on the student’s record for future reference.

The main excuse that students give when asked why something happened is “it can’t have been me, it must have been xxx whilst I went to get something.”  Our reply to this is that each student is responsible for their own account and that they must take care not to allow anyone else the chance to use it.

Since setting up this system, we have managed to identify a much larger number of incidents occuring on our network and have had the powers to take action.  As a result less than 10% of the students we now see have more than one offence to their name.

To view our AUP, sanctions and an AUP quiz click here.