'Child abuse on a national scale': Are school-issued iPads really safe for Scottish pupils?

And, worse, that portal - in the form of individual iPads and laptops - is school-issued.

While the devices are described as essential kit to prepare young people for a world in which digital literacy is vital, parents have been alarmed to learn their children can access graphic content at a touch of a button.

One father - and IT expert - goes further. “This is industrial child abuse on a national scale facilitated by this government,” said Harry Amies, founder of new campaign group Unplug.Scot.

In the past ten days, The Scotsman has revealed how easy it is for pupils to switch off safety filters on their devices.

While Edinburgh, Borders and Glasgow councils - where pupils have one-to-one allocation of devices - said robust filters were in place, children are still able to access hardcore content.

East Lothian Council is in the middle of a tech shutdown after pupils used Gmail to share pornography.

READ MORE: Children as young as 7 'can access porn' on Scottish council-issued iPads in Glasgow and Borders

“Although East Lothian's safety record is tragic, they're not the only ones to blame,” Mr Amies said. “Their filter and device supplier was contracted in a national deal agreed by the Scottish Government.

“Despite education, child protection and child health being fully devolved, this Scottish Government takes a ‘do nothing’ approach to digital safety in schools.”

Mr Amies pointed to a government-commissioned report from 2020 that made clear the life-long harm that follows exposure to porn in childhood.

“But then they not only don't restrict, but actively buy devices that enable instant access to extreme content and give them to hundreds of thousands of children,” he said.

Councils say they have robust protections in place to safeguard pupils using school-issued devices. These usually involve safe search functions - but these can be toggled off and on by anyone, without age verification.

Some search engines provide facilities for safe search to be enforced on controlled networks - such as in schools - but it is not possible to enforce safe search with most search engines, including Yahoo.

“Commonly major search engines even prompt users to disable the safe search with a click if there are lots of explicit image results available - to inquisitive and vulnerable children this isn't a barrier but an invitation,” Mr Amies said.

The recent Online Safety Act was drafted to help protect children and young people online. But critics say it contains multiple loopholes, one being that search engines have no apparent obligation to implement age verification beyond a simple slider or button.

Mr Amies said: “So we are leaving a whole generation to grow up not just stumbling across extreme content, but be forcefully shown it by classmates in a form of child-on-child abuse. This will harm - and is harming - children long term.”

Unlike in England, there is no requirement from the Scottish Government for schools to enforce safe search filtering and monitoring systems.

There is no regulatory body checking school-issued devices - “unmodified adult products”, Mr Amies calls them - and that platforms are safe for young children.

Concerns have also been raised about individual safeguarding practices in schools.

One Glasgow teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, said all children use the same AppleID password because they are too young to remember their own.

Some schools in Edinburgh - in written security policies freely available to see on school websites - write every child's login and password written on the back of the iPad case. This means anyone who has access to the device in the family can masquerade as the child to their friends.

Freedom of Information requests to all Scotland’s councils shows a patchwork of ratios of pupil-to-device across Scotland.

Aberdeen City Council, for example, does not have a one-to-one device programme for pupils and said none of the sites in question would be blocked on school computers. In Angus Council, nine primary schools have one-to-one access, with nearly 3,000 pupils in secondary school having their own device.

Renfrewshire Council said it does not have a one-to-one policy, but gave the classroom ratios as five-to-one for primary, four-to-one for secondary, three-to-one for additional support needs and 15-to-one for early years establishments.

As with almost all other Scottish local authorities, East Lothian said it does not carry out a specific risk assessment for digital devices in schools.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, the council said “we secure them using industry best practice and guidance from National Cyber Security Centre”.

David Wright, chief executive of the online safety charity SWGfL, said the safety of school-issued devices had been of grave concern for some years.

In England, changes were made following the death of autistic 15-year-old Frankie Thomas, who took her own life in 2018 after viewing inappropriate material on a school iPad.

At Frankie’s inquest, the coroner said the policies in place for schools to follow around filtering systems were not good enough. In 2023, schools in England became subject to four new filtering and monitoring standards.

One of those is that they must review their filtering and monitoring provision annually to check it works.

“For me, that's perhaps the most important one,” Mr Wright said. “Just because you've got a filtering system, that doesn’t mean that it is working or that it does what you expect it to do.”

With the push towards online privacy, the ability to screen harmful content is becoming increasingly difficult.

Join the thousands of Scots who already receive our daily newsletter

“The onward march to privacy - and we are all entitled to privacy - means all of a sudden now platforms cannot see the transmission of illegal child sex abuse material,” Mr Wright said.

“Last year we saw a dramatic drop in the number of reports the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children received from platforms. It's not that content is not still being shared, it's just that we can no longer see it being shared.”

Filtering on tablets is also different from that of laptops of computers. Rather than using a common browser such as Safari, some safe search platforms will build their own that will be required to work on the iPad.

This means that if a child downloads Safari onto the iPad, they will be able to circumvent all the safety filters.

Mr Wright said it becomes further complicated for parents in that parental controls are becoming more device-centred, rather than coming from the network level filtering. If a child has multiple devices, then it is easier for them circumvent the filters on each device.

Mr Wright added: “One of the things we want to see is control inter-operability, so that parents can manage a variety of devices that we have at home. Tech companies are all for presenting the simplicity of how using our technology is so simple, but that just masks a hideously complex situation.”

When Glasgow City Council began its iPad roll out in 2018, it was one of Apple’s largest education projects globally, with 80,000 devices distributed to pupils.

One of the positives that Glasgow emphasises is that, in a city with high levels of deprivation, the programme gives digital equity to all children.

Pupils from P5 to S6 have their own iPad, while younger pupils share one between five in class.

Chris Mier is digital development officer for the council, having become involved in the programme while teaching at Shawlands Primary School - one of the first in the city to receive the new iPads.

Mr Mier pointed to the importance of the assistive features in the iPads, which are helpful to ASN children with speech-to-text, text magnifying functions and eye gaze and head control.

In Glasgow, 26 per cent of pupils - 20,000 young people - have English as an additional language. The iPads’ translation tools are also, he said, a gift.

“The translation tools are built in, which allows our pupils to immediately access the curriculum as soon as they arrive in Glasgow, without having to wait for them to learn English organically,” Mr Mier said.

He gives an example of three learners joining a school from Pakistan and within 24 hours being able to access the complete curriculum through an app.

Previously, he added, it would have been a “long, drawn-out process”.

“With the iPads, everybody gets what they need to succeed,” Mr Mier said.

“We feel that the apps we provide and the applications that come built in with the device provide personalised learning experiences that allow for differentiated tasks to take place, instant feedback to be given, and multiple means of individual and personalised expression that the learners can use.

“They become independent learners because using the built in tools to research, plan, draft and present gives them growing independence. This allows them, in turn, to become authors, editors and content creators, rather than simply consumers of content.”

Mr Mier said the focus for teachers was on helping pupils develop skills that could transfer to the workplace or further education settings. He said young people were more motivated and more engaged with their learning because it was “interactive and multi-modal”.

“We're trying to prepare kids for a world that doesn't yet exist, and that means developing these skills,” Mr Mier said.

Digital citizenship is also taught in Glasgow schools, which Mr Mier said builds “an awareness of privacy and online responsibility”.

Sarah Pedersen, professor of media and communication at Robert Gordon University, agreed that some of the onus should be placed on teaching young people to guard their own safety. Parents, she added, must take responsibility too.

“The Online Safety Act was very much the government responding to pressure, mostly from parents, for them to do something, anything,” Prof Pedersen said.

“Parents are, of course, really worried about this, and you can absolutely understand that. But at the end of the day, there's no magic bullet that is going to solve it.”

The academic shares her concern there must be more emphasis on education, but also on parents becoming more involved, learning to use the same online platforms as their children and talking to them about those.

Otherwise, she said, the Online Safety Act would “send teenagers’ use of the internet underground, so that they will be too fearful of telling their teachers or their parents what they have seen”.

Prof Pedersen said: “If they have seen something that's distressing them, then they really need to be able to talk to people about this. Adolescence is a time of risk taking. That's one of the stages that adolescents go through in their development.

“These days, the easiest place to take risks is on the internet and that means we need to be educating children from a young age, not just saying you shouldn't do this.”

Talking to children in detail about the problems they might encounter online and giving them solutions should be the main focus, she claimed.

“We allow 17-year-olds to drive cars, but we make them take lessons first,” she said. “We don't just put them in a Porsche. Risk taking is part of adolescence, showing off, titillating yourself by looking at sex.

“Parents need to be stepping up as well. They can't just expect the government or the schools to solve the problem.”

The Scottish Government said online safety was the legal responsibility of local authorities.

A spokesman said the Government “takes issues like this very seriously”.

“We have received strong assurances that Glasgow, Borders and East Lothian councils have robust measures in place and are taking the required steps to address the concerns raised,” he said.

Mr Wright and Mr Amies remain less convinced. Mr Wright is clear that young people must learn how to use digital technology - but safety features need to be far more robust.

“Tablets are consumer devices, they're not necessarily built for enterprise environments, although I'm sure Apple will disagree with that statement,” he said.

Apple was contacted for comment.

“Filtering is art, not a science, but schools are often wholly reliant on the IT support companies that they contract, because the technology is ever increasing in terms of complexity,” Mr Wright added.

“If we make a mistake in this space, it could be catastrophic.”