The Childnet Digital Leaders Programme empowers children and young people to champion digital citizenship and digital creativity in their school or community. Digital Leaders aim to educate their peers, parents and teachers about staying safe online.

The programme offers pupils structured online training and ongoing support from Childnet’s expert team. The online platform makes online safety learning fun and effective. It also helps schools work towards an outstanding whole school community approach to keeping everyone safe online.

The programme will connect young people with other Childnet Digital Leader schools across the UK. It gives young people opportunities to engage with top tech companies and have their say in creating a better internet for the future.

Who are we and why did we begin the programme?

At Childnet, we work directly with children and young people from the ages of 3 to 18 on a weekly basis, finding out about their real experiences online, and the positive things they are doing as well as sharing safety advice. We also work with parents, carers, teachers, and professionals across the UK.

Since our inception in 1995, Childnet has sought to keep children and young people at the heart of all that we do. In all our work we seek to respond to the risks that children and young people may encounter online. Our aim is to make the internet a great and safe place for children and young people.

The Childnet Digital Leaders Programme began in 2014 so that we could engage young people in online safety education in a new and innovative way. Young people told us how they benefited from hearing from other people their own age, especially when it came to talking about technology. By directly consulting young people, teachers and schools we created the programme to help make online safety fun and effective.