Exclusive:Safeguarding fears as primary pupil 'emailed alleged child sex offender' dad in classroom on school iPad
The incident has raised questions about safeguarding pupils in schools where one-to-one iPads are used
Fears have been raised about the security of school iPads after it emerged a father accused of sex offences was able to secretly contact his son.
Emails between the P7 youngster and the dad, who is on bail for charges relating to possession of child sex abuse images, were found by chance.
Despite his mother raising the concerns with the school, the 11-year-old was still able to message with his father in class.
The mother, who we are not naming for legal reasons, also found hundreds of emails in group chats with pupils at other schools - despite being unaware her son had an email address at all.
The incident has raised wider safeguarding concerns.
The mother-of-three claims the school email addresses - part of the country-wide Glow system run by Education Scotland - are of a format incredibly easy to guess.
She says this means children are easily contactable without parental or teacher knowledge.
“Parents are not aware that their children have access to these accounts,” she said.
“I was not aware that this was something that could happen, that is was so unsupervised, and there is no one filtering these emails.
“My son had years’ worth of group chats with his friends and other children that the staff had no idea about.”
SBC is one of a handful of local authorities that give one-on-one iPads to all pupils.
The mother’s concerns were first sparked two weeks ago when she received an email from her son to her work address.
She was unaware he had a school email address and so asked to see the account on his iPad.
“There were screeds of emails to his friends, to other children from other schools who I didn’t know,” she said.
“I had no idea who the children were and I had never consented to this.”
Her son’s father is currently on bail in connection to possession of indecent images of children and is not permitted unsupervised contact with him.
Concerned that he may have used the iPad to contact his father also, she checked the inbox but found nothing from him.
However, the mum asked the school to double check and staff found one email to his father.
The teacher in charge of the school’s tech systems said there had been no reply and the school would monitor the emails.
The mother asked the school to keep the iPad in class and that he was not allowed email access until the situation was resolved.
She said: “Initially my report was about the issue with the other children.
“I didn’t know who he was contacting in all these group chats and sitting in class having chats with his friends was certainly not what I was told that iPad was for when I consented to usage in school.”
About a week later, teachers noticed a reply from the schoolboy’s father.
Staff blocked the email address and police were called.
However, the 11-year-old then admitted he had been emailing his dad all day while in class.
He had been told by his father how to delete emails permanently so his mother and teachers wouldn’t see them.
The boy’s mother said: “This was after I had reported his email usage.
“He still managed to sit all day unnoticed, emailing back and forth with his dad, who is a man who is on petition bail and who should not have access to children, in class time completely unsupervised.”
The mum has described the council response as “atrocious”, saying it was initially written off as a behavioural issue.
She was told, she claims, that her son should know he’s not allowed to use his iPad in that manner.
“It was all pinned on him. He is 11 years old.
“The school and the council is keen to present this as a complete one-off, isolated incident.
“But that's not going to fix the crux of the problem that a child has managed to be communicating with somebody they shouldn't have been and how easy it is to guess a child’s email address.”
It was also noticed that two of the boy’s classmates were CCd into the emails and correspondence had been shared with them.
“That's a GDPR breach, and those children's data has now been shared with somebody who could potentially be a danger to children,” the mum added.
She said she is determined to persist in raising her concerns with SBC because of fears the email system is open to abuse.
“One email address has been accessed but what about across the region?” the woman added.
“How many other children are accessing adults or children or people they’ve met online and are talking to them on school iPads?
“You don’t need to know much information about that child to be able to access them.”
The council said it cannot comment on the circumstances of an individual pupil but said it is “working closely with the head teacher in this instance”.
A spokeswoman said safety of pupils is “our highest priority” and there are a a range of measures in place to support online safety and digital safeguarding across schools.
She added: “Scottish Borders Council remains confident in the use of Glow as part of a wider suite of digital learning tools available to pupils and staff.
“In the 18 years since Glow was established, there have been no recorded incidents of an individual successfully identifying and targeting a child by guessing a Glow email address.”
A spokesman for Education Scotland said decisions about use of Glow services are taken by local authorities.
He added: “We equip them with the administrative tools to manage services in line with their own policies and procedures.
“As part of the Glow offer, we provide several layers of automated security defences and where specific concerns or exceptional circumstances arise, additional safeguards can be implemented."