Daily Safeguarding Update

Football in Fortnite: New sport collaboration is ‘just the start’

Fortnite has announced its latest collaboration: ‘The beautiful game’ which is a collaboration with some of the world’s biggest football clubs to offer licensed skins (outfits) and emotes (a specific move a character does)
Fortnite’s popularity has increased dramatically through the use of collaborations such as those with Disney’s Mandalorian
Twenty-three teams have signed up to have their kits in the game, including Manchester City, West Ham, Celtic, Rangers and Juventus.
There’ll also be a separate game mode where players can use their pickaxes to play four versus four football
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40,000 Britons who had joined the Facebook group ‘Land for Sale UK’ have now found that their newsfeed has been transformed into a string of extremist right-wing content
The group had been a moderately sized message board for people looking to buy or sell small parcels of land
Last week the group was renamed by new administrators as “Supporters of free speech against Big Tech Fascism”
Their “about” page has been changed to explain the new position of the group, including: “Banning people for [sic] telling the truth or you don’t like their opinion or politics is wrong. If your a Libtard you dont belong here. Goodbye.”
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Parents of children with special needs say they are struggling to cope because they are not getting their usual support or respite during lockdown
Some children have limited or no time in school and provision appears to depend on where they live
Many families are struggling with round-the-clock care, and want special schools to continue to operate full time in all areas
The Scottish Government said decisions had to be made on a case-by-case basis
Sophie Pilgrim, the Director of the charity Kindred told BBC Scotland: “It’s really not sustainable. The parents single-handily cannot provide that treatment and therapy for the children, without the support of the schools.”
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School attendance in England is five times higher than during the first lockdown, official figures show.
One in five (21%) primary school pupils and one in 20 (5%) secondary school pupils went into school last week, the Department for Education reports.
Only 4% of state primary school pupils and 1% from state secondaries were in school during closures last year.
The increase has been driven in part by children without laptops or tablets being allowed to attend school.
Around 980,000 students attended school last week, of which roughly three-quarters were children of critical workers, the DfE data shows.
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Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Jenny Harries has said a regional approach may be taken when deciding how schools in England reopen
When asked whether there could be a regional or phased system for reopening schools after the latest lockdown, Dr Harries said today: “I think it’s likely that we will have some sort of regional separation of interventions.”
Addressing the Education Select Committee, she added: “we will not have consistent patterns of infection in our communities across the country, and therefore, as we had prior to the national lockdown, it may well be possible that we need to have some differential application.”
Dr Harries said schools will be at the top of the priority to ensure that the balance of education and wellbeing is “right at the forefront” of consideration
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