On Thursday 9th June 2022 Securus CEO Bernard Snowe and Chairman Derek Allen had the privilege and pleasure of meeting our visitors from the Khalifa Empowerment Program – Aqdar in the UAE, Dr Ibrahim Al Dabal, CEO, along with his two colleagues, Mr Abdul Rahman Al Mansoori, Deputy CEO and Mr Sultan Al Kettbi, General Coordinator.
The day included a scheduled visit to one of our flagship schools, St John Bosco College in London, a mixed Roman Catholic school for 11-18 year-old pupils. The school has the Securus Full Monitoring Service in place to keep children safe online and we were hosted by the Deputy Headteacher and Designated Safeguarding Lead, Maria Budzynska.
Maria explained how the Securus Full Monitoring Service (FMS) safeguards their pupils and how the service we provide works in practice. As an experienced educator Maria has worked with Securus for many years and discussed how at the beginning of working with us the designated school staff initially carried out the checking & monitoring of the capture data themselves but found that this was not the best use of their time. It was then decided that they would take advantage of the Full Monitoring Service (FMS) where the Securus safeguarding team manage the data on behalf of the school and send them alerts for all instances of concern. Maria explained that this has been transformational for the school and is now seen as both essential and of great value.
Maria spent quality time with Dr Ibrahim and his colleagues, answering their many questions and providing them with an excellent insight on how the school relies on Securus and how the software fundamentally helps change behaviours and safeguards pupils in this very busy London secondary school. She provided several specific examples of incidents she has dealt with and how promptly the school can respond to issues due to the real time alerts & regular reports. Furthermore, Maria explained how they often quickly provide short sharp changes to the curriculum to educate pupils on a particular concern raised and also how they sometimes need to engage with the police and parents for any concerns that need to be escalated.
Paul Dunne, Headteacher at St John Bosco commented, “Our relationship with Securus has been excellent. They have made the school feel like a partner rather than a customer. The implementation of Securus has ensured that parents can feel confident about their children being able to use school’s technology safely, my teachers feel the same. The high degree of scrutiny and transparency offered by Securus, enables them to get on with the business of teaching, knowing that the students are safe. The Securus Full Monitoring Service is an invaluable safeguarding provision within the school”
A Securus presentation also took place and covered the following key topics:
- explained the technical setup at the UAE Ministry Of Interior and emphasised the solution is tested, approved and ready to be deployed.
- discussed options around the output of the data we capture, including our latest dashboard reporting tool, which can display data for all schools, school clusters and even single schools/year groups. Used here in the UK, it provides high level summarised information plus drills down to individual details of captures and can display a variety of trends and patterns– a very powerful tool.
- provided an overview relating to the library of words and phrases at the heart of the solution and discussed the dual English/Arabic library supported and how Aqdar (or whoever is nominated) is in control of the library and can add additional words and phrases.
- showed an anonymised example of actual capture data generated from a school group here in the UK.
The visit concluded with a full tour around the school and photographs.
CEO Bernard Snowe concluded “We were delighted to spend the time with Dr Ibrahim and his colleagues and to discuss the next phase of the deployment of Securus across the schools in the UAE. Once complete, we understand the UAE will be the first country to mandate this level of safeguarding for the whole of its school population. We would like to thank Maria and St John Bosco College for their time and we are very pleased our honoured guests found the visit of such value and were impressed with how Securus works in a school setting. We look forward to continuing our work together with Aqdar in support of the eSafe Schools initiative in the UAE”.
