Safe digital learning is so important, and the team at N4L are here to help protect your school from online threats and harmful content. Using our Safe & Secure Internet, schools have a range of industry leading services to provide ākonga with a baseline level of protection while learning online at school.

While the whole of New Zealand’s education sector and telco community have been working out how to ensure ākonga have access to the internet, suitable devices, and quality online resources – we’ve been busy beavering away to make sure there’s one less thing to take care of… your school’s online safety and security!

In many of our conversations over the years with principals, school leaders, educators, IT administrators and companies that support schools, “it just works” is a recurring phrase that keeps popping up, and our upgraded Managed Network has meant that we’re even better at ensuring this remains true.

What we’re doing

With that in mind we worked with schools, the Ministry of Education, CERT NZ, Netsafe and IT providers to put systems & processes in place, including reframing the way we provide our suite of online safety and security services. We’ve wrapped the most important elements and recommended settings into one easy to implement baseline level of protection called Safe & Secure Internet. Gone are the days of wondering whether you’ve implemented the right N4L services, or more importantly, if you have them configured appropriately. 

Now it’s super easy! If you have our Safe & Secure Internet, then you have our baseline level of protection that we recommend for all schools. If you don’t, then it’s likely we’ve been in touch – but you can always reach out to our Helpdesk team on 0800 LEARNING to check if you have it.

Want to hear what schools across Aotearoa say about our Safe & Secure Internet? We’ve met with key staff to get their feedback on how it helped them protect their ākonga online. Check out the video here. 

So what’s included?

  • Managed Network internet connection
  • Web Filtering (including our recommended categories)
  • Firewall (including our specific settings)
  • DNS Threat Protection
  • DDoS Protection

For more information check out our website here or skip right into the technical details here

A couple of points to note 

It’s important to remember that there’s no way to guarantee 100% protection from online threats or inappropriate content. There are other measures schools should take to help keep their online learning environments safe and secure, such as promoting digital citizenship and making sure that systems and software are up to date. 

Also schools can have a safe and secure online learning environment by having appropriate settings applied via third party providers. However, N4L won’t be able to assess whether you meet our baseline level of protection.