Digital Schools Awards Digital Wellbeing Award for Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety:
What is Digital Wellbeing Award and what do schools need to know:
This Evidence Checklist is a suggested guide for nurseries/schools in selecting examples where their policies, practices and other activities meet the requirements of each criteria.
The Award does not specify the number of pieces of evidence needed to meet the requirements of each criteria but rather that the evidence they provide is representative of the overall experience of students and teachers.
Digital wellbeing is the impact of using digital technology on children and young people’s social, emotional wellbeing.
This framework has drawn together national and European perspectives and distilled them into a whole-school road map for promoting students’ digital wellbeing through strong Cyber Resilience and Internet Safety practices. In the immediate and long-term future, schools, face increasing demands to include digital wellbeing as part of the way they use digital technologies for learning and teaching. The challenge is not only to ensure children’s digital wellbeing but to establish processes and strategies that will allow students to develop the skills, knowledge and attributes to secure, manage and protect their own wellbeing. This important challenge underpins the Digital Schools Award’s ethos, which is to assist schools to develop, nurture and sustain resilient and positive digital practices in learning and teaching as well as alleviate its risks and threats.
We are spending an increasing amount of time learning, playing and socialising in online environments. In 2025, over 95 % of children aged 8–14 in the UK used the internet regularly, including via services such as YouTube and Google Search (Ofcom).
Our online behaviours fall into three categories, we:
To support our children and young people navigate this part of their lives, we need to be able to support them to recognise, react to, and recover from online harms. At the same time, we need to promote safer, smarted and kinder ways of playing, learning and socialising online.
The Scottish Government states that “Cyber resilience is not just about responding to threats. It’s about building strength, confidence and continuity into every part of an organisation. It is not only about technology, but also about people: their awareness, skills and ability to respond effectively when things go wrong.” (Introduction – Cyber Resilient Scotland 2025 to 2030: strategic framework – gov.scot)
Features of cyber resilience include:
Young people and staff recognise and manage cyber risks
Schools and organisations can respond effectively to cyber incidents
Digital learning and public services are safe and resilient
Education settings manage their cyber risks confidently
Scotland supports skilled young people entering cyber security
(From Cyber Resilient Scotland 2025–2030 Strategic Framework. Cyber Resilient Scotland 2025 to 2030: strategic framework – gov.scot)
“We continue to work cooperatively in Scotland with a wide range of statutory and third‑sector organisations to promote positive behaviours online to our children and young people, and ensure they are equipped with the knowledge to stay safe and act when they encounter harm.”
(Online safety – call for action: Ministerial letter – gov.scot)
This is defined within these outcomes:
Digital Wellbeing
For the purposes of the DSA award programme for schools and for the development of the framework, we draw together the many perspectives on digital wellbeing and define it as:
Being positive, constructive and resilient in the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to maximise the benefits of digital technologies for personal, social and learning purposes
Digital wellbeing, therefore, could be said to have the following elements:
“Tools and rules are no replacement for open dialogue. They can only ever be part of the solution” (Phippen, 2019)
Phippen, A., (2019), Young People, Internet use and wellbeing technology in the home, Southwest Grid for Learning, https://swgfl.org.uk/assets/documents/technology-in-the-home-1.pdf
