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As part of Safeguarding Awareness Week, we're focusing on how schools can empower students to stay safe and thrive online. With young people spending more time than ever in digital spaces, it's vital that they not only understand the risks but are also equipped to respond to them with confidence and resilience. One key area of this is digital resilience—the ability to recognise online risks, recover from negative experiences, and learn from them.

Tony Newman, resilience expert and author of the book  defines a resilient child as one who: 

"can resist adversity, cope with uncertainty and recover more successfully from traumatic events or episodes"  

This ability to maintain positive wellbeing is acquired through experience, although there may be some inherited aspects. It is not about invulnerability, more a capacity to cope; continuous and extreme adversity is likely to drain even the most resilient of children. 

The online world mirrors the real world, however, there are additional factors when using the internet, and building specific digital resilience is part of helping our children and young people become more resilient in general, to enhance their emotional and physical wellbeing.  

What is digital resilience? 

is understanding when you may be at risk online, knowing what to do if something goes wrong, learning from your experiences of being online, and being able to recover from any difficulties or upsets. 

As , it's imperative that children learn to be digitally resilient from a young age. Most will learn through experiences and reflection via safe online activities within managed environments. As such, it's important that digital activities are built into everyday teaching and learning, rather than being a one-off event. 

Key elements of digital resilience 

Digital resilience for children comprises a few key elements: 

• Understand: the child understands that they can be at risk online and therefore needs to be able to make informed decisions about the digital space they are in. 
• Know: the child knows how to ask for help as required and where they can access appropriate resources. 
• Recover: the child can recover if things go wrong online by seeking help from an appropriate person. 
• Learn: the child learns from the experience and can adjust future decisions based on this learning. 

Why is digital resilience important? 

In today's world, children spend huge amounts of time online from a young age. The reports that 92.6% of children went online daily or almost daily in the year ending March 2023, with 58.1% spending three or more hours a day online 

More time spent online means more exposure to potential threats. Here are just a few key to put this in perspective: 

• A third of children accepted a friend request from someone they did not know. 
• 8.5% of children shared their location publicly online. 
• 19.2% of children messaged someone online that they had never met in person. 
• 19.1% of children experienced online bullying, 18% of which never told anyone.  

How do you build digital resilience? 

Now you know why digital resilience is so important, let's look at some of the best ways to instil it in students. 

• Encourage open communication - build open and honest relationships with students where they feel comfortable asking for support or help when needed. 
• Allow children to engage with online activities – as scary as the possibilities of the internet can be, avoidance and restriction denies children the chance to practice online skills in a safe and controlled environment. 
• Resist the urge to fix problems yourself – when children run into trouble online, a teacher's instinct may be to step in and fix it themselves. Unless a child is in a serious or dangerous situation, it can be beneficial to help them learn how to fix it.  
• Be a role model – don't underestimate the power of observation. Teacher's need to model healthy digital behaviours in front of their students. 
• Ensure that children learn basic media and technology literacy skills – most children in the UK will have ICT lessons in some capacity, however it's important to not get complacent. Address any striking issues if they appear. 
• Recognise that entertainment can also offer learning opportunities – online learning opportunities don't solely exist in formal tasks and taught sessions. Children can learn a lot from age-appropriate games, TV and other media (in appropriate settings). 

How Tes can help 

At Tes, we offer a range of tools and courses to help keep children safe online, including our that looks at the social aspect of how children and young people use the internet, and the risks attached, as well as looking at the impact of social media on emotional wellbeing. 

Find more teacher training courses at Tes Institute, or take a look at our Safeguarding Training for school staff.  

Explore more for Safeguarding Awareness Week

Looking for more support, activities and resources?

Visit our Safeguarding Awareness Week homepage for free assembly packs, expert advice, resources, and more ways to get involved in promoting online safety and wellbeing in your school.