As a school, social media issues arise from time to time. We are finding a number of our ākonga have multiple public accounts with images of them in school uniform.

To support you, we have our own West Melton School Safety Hub linked to our school website. An excellent article about TikTok is on the hub at this link.  We are finding a number of our ākonga have multiple public accounts with images of them in school uniform.

I have included one part of the article, which is a section on How can I make TikTok safer for my teen?

TikTok can be a fun and extremely entertaining and creative outlet for teens; however, the platform has many potential risks that parents should carefully consider before allowing their children to access the content. Parents can help minimize the risks by following a few simple tips:

• Actively involve yourself in your teen’s TikTok account set up. Ensure they enter their correct birth year to enable the platform’s appropriate privacy settings and filters. Additionally, maximize privacy settings for account interaction by selecting either ‘Friends’ or ‘No one’ within the ‘Who can…’ heading. Please see detailed instructions for doing this in the ‘How to’ section of this app review.

• Set up Family Pairing to enable some control over the management of your child’s screen time, search ability, account visibility, content restriction, direct messaging capability, content suggestions, and more. Detailed instructions for how to set this feature up can be found in the ‘How to’ section of this app review.

• Create a family tech agreement that includes rules regarding screen time limits and interacting with others online.

• Install appropriate parental controls on your child’s device.

• Ensure your child knows what to do if they see something on the platform that makes them feel uncomfortable or if someone on the platform is bullying or bothering them. Detailed instructions for reporting a problem can be found in TikTok’s safety support section.