News

Monday 9th Jan

 

Dear Parents, Carers and Students,

Welcome to our newsletter for the second week of the Spring Term 2023. It’s Week B with year assemblies taking place focusing on our new achievement points supporting the character development of students.

There’s a great deal of important information in this week’s newsletter - in particular, please do take time to read the information about Andrew Tate and online hate. We will also be covering this topic in whole school assemblies shortly.

There is also information regarding a BBC report from last week which named the school in relation to a loss of data. This cyber event took place back in July and I can reassure you that no high risk data was taken and the school worked with our IT provider, data protection officer and the Information Commissioner to ensure that the issue was resolved swiftly and effectively. Please see my more detailed statement about this below.

With best wishes for the week ahead.

 Stephen Davis

 

Proposal to expand the Sixth Form consultation 

We are in the process of applying for funding to enlarge our Sixth Form centre to provide more Sixth Form specialist classrooms. As per government requirements, we are currently running a consultation -  if you would like to contribute please access via this link.

 

Safeguarding briefing - Andrew Tate & online hate 

 There has been a lot in the news recently about the online social media entrepreneur Andrew Tate since his arrest in Romania last week. Tate’s views are at best sexist, and at worst have the potential to incite violence towards women.  If you don't know much about Tate, this is a good explainer.  It's a topic we will address in assembly and tutor period in the week beginning 30th January, in the context of protecting yourself from being exploited and manipulated by online hatred. 

Worryingly, we know that some of our students have a particular regard for Andrew Tate and some of his views. We are worried that some students may be attracted to the way that he exploits genuine uncertainty about what it means to be a man, in order to manipulate and draw young men into a hateful ideology. If you have concerns about your child being drawn into any hateful ideology, groomed or exploited online please contact the Safeguarding team at the school safeguarding@lampton.org.uk. This new website, promoted by the police, also provides helpful information for parents and carers: https://www.isthisok.org.uk/parents-carers/

 

Cyber-attack

On Friday the BBC published on their news website an article entitled “Schools hit by cyber-attack and documents leaked”. In the article it notes that they had found documents on the internet from Lampton School.

 At Lampton, we take the security of our information technology network and data very seriously, and so we informed our data protection officer and the Information Commissioner’s Office of the cyber-attack, immediately we became aware of it in July 2022. We followed the guidance of our data protection officer and the Information Commissioner’s Office in the aftermath of the cyber-attack. Our managed service provider, Colwyn Technologies ensured that our files were swiftly restored and our network was quickly up and running. This reduced the disruption to our school community.  We have enhanced the security of our information technology network to reduce the chance of a cyber-attack in the future.

 In October 2022 we received a letter from the Information Commissioner’s Office,  where they stated that no further action was required due to “the low risk of harm to affected data subjects, and the remedial measures implemented [by the school] in order to prevent a reoccurrence”