We were honoured to welcome the founders of the Christoforos Charity Foundation (CCF) to school this week to mark Anti-Bullying Week. This charity was founded by Christoforos’ parents, following his tragic death in 2022.
Christoforos became a victim of online harmful material, as so many others have done, and this charity
seeks to help break that cycle by talking to students about the dangers that they are faced with every day online. This initiative recommends the following six steps to help limit the exposure students have to this harmful material, and EBS fully supports these steps for all students:
- Use an app to track how much time you spend on social media each day. Then set a goal for how much you want to reduce it by.
- Turn off your phone at certain times of the day, such as having dinner with your family, spending time with offline friends, or playing with board games with your parents. Don’t take your phone with you to the bathroom.
- Don’t bring your phone or tablet to bed. Turn devices off and leave them in another room overnight to charge.
- Disable social media notifications. It’s hard to resist the constant buzzing, beeping, and dinging of your phone alerting you to new messages. Turning off notifications can help you regain control of your time and focus.
- Limit checks. If you compulsively checking your phone every few minutes, wean yourself off by limiting your checks to once every 30 minutes. Then once every 40 minutes, then once an hour. There are apps that can automatically limit when you’re able to access your phone.
- Try removing social media apps from your phone so you can only check Facebook for example and the like from your tablet or computer. If this sounds like too drastic a step, try removing one social media app at a time to see how much you really miss it.
CCF spoke with Key Stage 3 this week, but will be returning next week to speak with Key Stage 4 and 5. If you would like more information on the great work CCF do, or would like to donate to the charity, you can do so via the Christoforos Charity Foundation website.
We have many great resources on the Safeguarding page of our own website, to help with all aspects of the cyber world.
