Norwich City are proud to support Safer Internet Day, which took place on Tuesday, February 8.
As a club we are committed to ensuring that all our environments (including online) meet industry safeguarding standards through our Canary Safe campaign.
Research shows that youngsters, through smartphones, video sharing platforms and online gaming, are using the internet more than ever. As a football club we are keen to promote how to use the online world safely as well as celebrating young people’s roles in creating a safer internet.
Speaking about being safe online, first team player Andrew Omobamidele, who joined our 1JE Sports player Lyricz for a discussion on the subject, reflected on how he uses social media and the importance of staying safe online.
He said: "I think it is very important, because social media is massive now. You just need to keep safe and one of my biggest ways of doing that is switching off from it sometimes. I am not on it all the time. I do have Instagram but sometimes I leave my phone down and just switch off from it.
"Football is really all about opinions and everyone is entitled to their own opinion on how you have played, but only you really know who you are if that makes sense. So other people's opinions shouldn't really matter that much to you."
Our Junior Canaries website has a page specially dedicated to content around online safety to ensure all young fans understand the risks associated with the online world, how they can learn to be safe online and report any concerns they may have.
This includes tops for online safety aimed at key stage one, two and three children, links to the Premier League’s new pages created alongside and a link to CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) for reporting safety concerns.
At Norwich City Academy; a digital safety newsletter has been produced and circulated to all parents with players in the academy, using material from CEOP and from the club’s safeguarding department; our academy scholars have participated in online safety workshops as part of the Elite Player Performance Plan’s life skills programme and B5 Consultancy, run by lawyer Matt Himsworth and former player Fraser Franks, have undertaken reviews of the under-18s squads social media platform use and have advised the group regarding perception and reputation issues on what they have liked, interacted with and posted to ensure that they are safe online.
The Community Sports Foundation also hold a computing skills course led by HSBC, which help some of our older fans to be safer online. The Foundation’s Digital Extra Time course, which takes places every Friday at The Nest, allows over-60s to learn and develop digital skills and thanks to the support of Clarion Futures, the course is completely free of charge.