TikTok Failed to Ban Flagged Online Predator

  • TikTok’s pledge to take “immediate action” against child predators has been challenged by a BBC Panorama investigation
  • An account created for the programme, which identified itself as belonging to a 14-year-old girl – reported a male adult for sending sexual messages and TikTok did not ban it
  • The platform eventually took action after Panorama sought an explanation
  • The video-sharing platform claimed its moderators did not intervene in the first instance because the child’s account had not made it clear the offending posts had been received via TikTok’s direct messaging (DM) facility
  • However, Panorama’s account had in fact selected and submitted each of the seven chat messages involved via the app’s own reporting tool.
  • “The thing with TikTok is it’s fun, and I think whenever someone is having fun they’re not recognising the dangers,” said Lorin LaFave, founder of the Breck Foundation.
  • For more information, check out the TikTok section of your app under the Social Media section of ‘Digital safety’

Senior Scottish Students will have to Wear Masks

  • Senior pupils and their teachers in Scotland are being advised to wear face coverings in classrooms in the new level 3 and 4 restriction areas
  • The Scottish government has released new guidance on school safety to take account of the five-level Covid alert system, which begins on today
  • Other guidance advises staff to wear face coverings in all schools, where social distancing is not possible
  • Parents should wear masks even at drop-off and pick-up
  • That applies even if they are not entering the school, Deputy First Minister John Swinney told the daily media briefing

Disadvantaged Children can Enrol in Catch-Up Tuition

    • Disadvantaged pupils in England could begin focused tuition as early as next week, as booking opens for the new National Tutoring Programme
    • The government says there is clear evidence that poor pupils lost out most when schools were closed. This scheme aims to close the learning gap
    • “This is about levelling up those opportunities,” said Education Secretary Gavin Williamson
    • But education unions say tuition should be delivered by qualified teachers
    • The 32 organisations selected to deliver the programme are braced for a flood of tuition bookings for pupils from poorer families aged five to 16
    • The tutoring will be subsidised by 75% and some sessions could cost schools as little as £50 for a block of 15, say the organisers

     

    UK Food Aid Charities Highlight ‘Newly Hungry’

    • Food aid charities have identified the emergence of the UK’s “newly hungry”. A growing cohort of people previously in good jobs and enjoying comfortable incomes who have been forced to use food banks and claim welfare benefits for the first time as a result of the pandemic
    • The Feeding Britain network said its members were providing food support to a new influx of middle-income families who had been plunged into crisis by Covid-related job losses and gaps in the social security system
    • “We now see families at food banks who before the pandemic were able to pay their bills and still be comfortable enough to put food on the table. For the first time in many years that is no longer the case,” said the charity’s national director, Andrew Forsey
    • Research before Covid-19 showed the vast majority of people who used food banks were destitute and penniless
    • Feeding Britain called on ministers to commit to keeping the £20-a-week Covid top-up for universal credit and tax credits, and to extend it to more than a million people on legacy benefits who were excluded from last April’s one-year uplift