Guide

Evidence your online
safety teaching.

Where online safety teaching sits in the November 2025 inspection framework, what counts as evidence, the gaps that undermine the story — and a termly routine that means you're never assembling a folder the week before.

The framework

Where online safety teaching shows up in an inspection

Since November 2025, Ofsted inspects against a renewed framework: no single headline judgement, but a report card grading evaluation areas — including personal development and well-being and curriculum and teaching — on a five-point scale from "exceptional" to "urgent improvement". Safeguarding is evaluated separately as met or not met.

Online safety teaching doesn't get its own grade. It surfaces in the conversation about your curriculum — how RSHE and Computing are planned, sequenced and taught — and in the personal development picture. Inspectors don't require documentation in any particular format; what they probe is whether leaders know their provision: what is taught, when, to whom, and how you know it's landing. "We take online safety seriously" isn't an answer to any of those questions. A record is.

The same questions come from closer to home, more often: governors, SLT, trust reviews and your own personal development self-evaluation all want the same story — and from September 2026 the updated RSHE guidance makes the taught content itself statutory, which raises the bar for being able to show it happened.

Scope: teaching evidence, not filtering and monitoring
This guide is about evidencing online safety teaching. Schools also have separate filtering and monitoring duties under KCSIE — technical network controls owned by IT and your DSL. Those are a different workstream with different evidence, and no teaching platform (ours included) discharges them. Don't let a provider blur the two; inspectors won't.
The evidence

Six things that make the story credible

Strong evidence of online safety teaching isn't a thick folder — it's a handful of things that connect: what you planned, what happened, and what you did about the gaps.

A mapped curriculum

Every lesson tied to named curriculum content — the RSHE Online safety and awareness and Wellbeing online strands, and Computing outcomes — so coverage is checkable, not asserted.

A deliberate sequence

A rationale for what's taught in which year and why — especially now the guidance has dropped fixed age brackets and left sequencing to schools to decide and justify.

A delivery record

What was actually taught, when, and by whom — across RSHE lessons, Computing and tutor time. Planned coverage and real coverage are rarely the same thing.

Completion by class and student

Who completed what, down to student level — so you can answer "how do you know every student got this?" rather than "it was on the timetable".

Student voice

Inspectors talk to students. If Year 10 can explain what sextortion is and what they'd do about it, that's worth more than any spreadsheet — and it only happens if the teaching was real and recent.

A reporting trail

Termly summaries to SLT and governors — coverage, gaps, and what changed as a result. Evidence that leaders act on the picture is the difference between a record and a story.
The pitfalls

Four gaps that undermine an otherwise good story

"We did an assembly"
One assembly and a Safer Internet Day isn't a curriculum, and it can't be mapped to the named RSHE strands. Assemblies are fine as amplifiers — they can't be the provision.
Login data dressed up as learning
A report showing students logged into a platform proves activity, not teaching. Evidence needs to show what was taught and completed, not that accounts were used.
Uneven coverage nobody spotted
Delivery that depends on individual tutors drifts: 9X gets the full sequence, 9Y gets half of it. Without class-level visibility, the school genuinely doesn't know — which is exactly the question a whole-school view exists to answer.
The week-before folder
Evidence assembled retrospectively reads as exactly that. A record that accumulates as teaching happens is both less work and more convincing — which is the argument for making it routine, below.
The routine

A rhythm that keeps you ready without extra workload

None of this needs a new working group. Two habits — one termly, one annual — cover it.

Each term

Check and report

  • Pull the coverage picture: what was taught, by class, against the plan
  • Flag classes or students who missed content, and schedule the catch-up
  • Add one current-threat touchpoint — something students are actually seeing this term, not just the scheme of work
  • Send a half-page summary to SLT / governors: coverage, gaps, actions
Each year

Review and resequence

  • Re-map provision against the RSHE strands and Computing outcomes — the 2026 guidance moved the goalposts once; it will move again
  • Review the KS3→KS4 sequence and the rationale for what lands when
  • Sample student voice: can they explain the risks, not just recall the lesson?
  • Retire dated examples — anything students would call "history" undermines the rest
A note on free resources — including ours
Cloak's free activities are deliberately login-free, so they produce no record: they're tasters and lesson starters, not evidence. If free resources are part of your provision, the delivery record has to come from your own tracking. That's the honest trade-off with any login-free resource — and the gap a platform with signed-in student progress exists to close.
Sources

Go deeper

Education inspection framework (from November 2025)
Ofsted — the renewed framework: report cards, evaluation areas and grading
RSHE statutory guidance (2025 update)
DfE — the taught content that becomes compulsory from 1 September 2026
Keeping children safe in education
DfE — statutory safeguarding guidance, including the separate filtering and monitoring duties
Teaching online safety in schools
DfE — non-statutory guidance on delivering online safety within existing subjects
Online safety lessons for KS3 and KS4
Cloak — our guide to planning the provision this page helps you evidence
Cloak for Schools
A record that builds itself as students learn.

Lessons mapped to the RSHE online-safety strands and sequenced across KS3 and KS4, signed-in student progress feeding a teacher dashboard, and a whole-school view for leads — what was taught, who completed it, where the gaps are.

See the curriculum mapping → Register interest →