Website Filtering for Schools Provided by IT Services
IT Services provide a filtered internet feed to over 500 of the county’s schools. Providing a safe web
browsing experience for children is very important and this needs to be balanced with the requirements of
the National Curriculum to provide appropriate content for all key stages. There are 18 categories of
website that are filtered for schools’ access:









Adults Only
Chat
Hate /
Discrimination
Drugs
Gambling
Tasteless / Gross
Illegal
Profanity
Lingerie









Nudity
Personals
Porn Site
School Cheating
Info
Sex
Suicide / Murder
Tobacco
Violence
Weapons
There are some exceptions to this however – for example where a medical or educational site contained
nudity then this would be allowed.
Internet safety is taken very seriously and IT Services has chosen its filtering service with care. Several
commercial providers were evaluated before a decision was made, and the filtering service finally
selected is provided by a company called N2H2. No other solution came close to offering the levels of
protection that N2H2 does, as the company uses proprietary code - therefore no competitor can offer an
identical service. The unique part of the N2H2 filter is that it checks not only for website addresses
containing unsuitable words, but also for content using "smart" technology. This is backed up by a human
review process.
Over 40 categories of website are available to filter for content, and organisations can select as many or
as few as required. The 18 categories used by Hampshire County Council for the schools’ service have
been agreed between IT Services and the Education Department.
Frequently accessed sites are cached locally to improve response times and local management tools are
provided to over-ride database entries if required, and to manually add sites to the local system.
Local filtering lists are used in addition to the daily updates received from the main database, and urgent
requests to block sites can be carried out when required. However customers need to bear in mind that to
block a site immediately requires stopping the entire internet service to all schools, and this would only be
undertaken in extreme circumstances. Otherwise the site is added to the local filter and this updates
overnight. Occasionally a legitimate site is blocked by the filter and again, this can be rectified overnight if
the site is found to be safe when investigated. The normal reason for this is that a site is hosted on a web
server that also hosts unsuitable sites, which the individual site owner may be unaware of. IT Services
can review these sites and grant access to them on a case-by-case basis.
N2H2 was formed in 1995 and now has the largest Internet content management database in the world,
with 48 million entries listed in 2001. At that time, over 17 million people were using the solution through
their workplace or within schools.
To give some perspective on the scale of the problem, N2H2 reported last July that pornographic web
pages alone (so that is one category of site from a total of over 40) that they had blocked through their
database had hit 260 million, with 28 million sites being identified in one month alone. That's a 20-fold
increase on the figure given above for 2001.
Any concerns about a site that should not be available to children (or vice-versa – where a site is blocked
by mistake) should be raised through the EdICT helpdesk.