How one primary school is helping pupils open up

A primary school has set up a lunch club to help children as young as reception open up about a whole range of issues including online safety.

Kings Road Primary School in Trafford, Greater Manchester, encourages pupils to be open on issues from homework to talking about social media also becoming more frequent.

The latest Ofsted figures show 20% of three to five-year-olds - and 42% of eight to nine-year-olds - have their own mobile phone.

Ann Jaffrey, network manager, said "it's never too young" to teach children about online safety.

"We start from Reception," she told BBC North West Tonight.

"The school has a responsibility to make sure whether they're in school or outside school that they're not on anything they shouldn't be.

"Because anything they do go on at home, is coming back into school - because of the friendship groups."

A BBC survey has revealed only 2% of Key Stage Two (ages seven to 12) teachers in the North West said they did not notice mobiles causing "social or friendship issues".

Year 4 and 5 being a growing problem.

Jo Whiteside, pastoral lead, said the primary school tackled issues arising from social media communications between pupil at the lunchtime club, The Hub,

"Children will have fallouts here in school - and where at one time those fallouts would end at the end of the school day, now children are in WhatsApp groups and those fallouts continue into an evening," she said.

"Behaviours that children show in those aren't the same as the ones as they would show here at school.

"And I'm picking up the pieces of those [behaviours] the following day - to try and repair those relationships with children."

The head teacher at Kings Road though believes the main issues surrounding phone use came from older children at the school.

Darren Morgan said: "It's mainly Year Six who have phones - I would say 80% of them do.

"There's a lot of pressure for children to have a phone in Year Six and then that pressure increases by the time they get to Year Seven where it's pretty close to 100% that have phones."

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