safeguarding
Online Safety is often the biggest concern when your child wants to play online.
When I’m approached by a parent who is unsure about their child playing online with other children, I make sure they know all the safeguarding procedures I have put in place. I thought I’d put them in a blog post for anyone who is on the website and wondering if this is safe for their child.
Safeguarding is at the forefront of what we do. Parent involvement and communication is a vital part of this. That’s why we love to connect with parents on the phone, via email or social media so that we all know who we are talking to.
Rachel Conlisk is Designated Safeguarding Lead, and completed Level 2 Safeguarding Training in 2022 and Level 3 DSL Training in 2023.
We do not allow anyone to join the server unless we have manually approved them. For this, the parent needs to apply to join on behalf of the child, we verify age and identity, and then we send joining details out. Once the child adds the server, they cannot enter our worlds until we manually add their Minecraft user name to the approved players list, adding a further level of safeguarding.
Our server is always open, so you might wonder who your child could be playing with. One of our young players came up with a solution and hand coded a program and uploaded to our website. They are amazing. So – if you want to know who your child is online on our Server with at any time, you can see which user names are playing and which world they are playing in. Visit http://status.minemania.co/
We have an automatic log of all ‘text-chat’ communication within the Minecraft server worlds and log of the gameplay stored on the server, so we can retrieve any conversations or game interactions at any time if any parent or child has any issues or concerns.
Although there won’t be an adult Admin online on the server 24/7, we can be contacted via email hello@minemania.co or via our Facebook Page.
We recommend to parents/carers that your child plays in the room with you in earshot and you can see what we are doing as well. We also like it that if parents are in the background during our scheduled sessions, we can all get to know each other as well! We have made some lovely friendships this way.
We have game rules and a code of conduct (displayed on entry to our game world and on the website) that all players must abide by, or they can be temporarily or even permanently ejected from the server.
Our volunteers who are over 18 are DBS checked and undergo the NSPCC Online Tutor Safeguarding Course. Any external tutors will hold a DBS check.
We encourage our players who have reached a certain level of experience to level up to becoming volunteer Admins and Developers on the server. This builds self confidence and leadership and is great experience with opportunities for more learning and upskilling. So you may encounter Admins who are under 18 as well as adult Admins. Admin roles would only be offered after consulting parents/carers.
Our booking form is only accessible to members who are registered and who we email the password to.
Our forum that parents and children are welcome to use to communicate is also password protected.
You can find all of our safeguarding policies on our parent company website at https://creativeactivelives.org.uk/policies/
