What We’ve Learned (and Upgraded) in Student Safeguarding This Year
We are continuously reviewing and refining how Linewize Monitor works to stay ahead of the changing risk landscape.
Student safety doesn't stand still, and neither does our technology.
We are continuously reviewing and refining how Linewize Monitor works to stay ahead of the changing risk landscape.
Over this past school year, we’ve expanded our safeguarding team, sharpened our policies and Monitor’s detection nuances, and rebuilt the Monitor user interface (UI) to give your staff a clearer view of the risks facing your students.
Here's what this past school year taught us about student safeguarding, and the refinements we made in response.
Growing our human moderation team
More than 20 new moderators joined our Monitor team this year, with many from classroom, social care, mental health services and education backgrounds.
That professional safeguarding judgment matters.
It means that the captures your students generate are reviewed by people who understand safeguarding as a discipline, bringing care, context and experience to every alert.
"Safeguarding isn't just a part of education, it's fundamental to it. Joining [the Monitor team] was a natural step for me, combining my experience as a teacher with a shared mission to keep children safe in an increasingly digital world." - Suzanne, Team Lead
"I previously worked in social care for fifteen years. When I heard about the work [Monitor] does, it felt like the workplace I'd been looking for." - Rachel, Associate Education Monitoring Analyst
We are beyond grateful to our human moderation team, who work 24/7 to review the alerts that come in, provide crucial context and notes for school safeguarding staff, and place emergency phone calls to our customer districts in the most serious of cases.
Listening to how your students actually talk
Over the past year, we’ve updated how Monitor handles the tone of content it picks up on, particularly in reference to violent topics such as school shootings.
More and more, safeguarding professionals are seeing that young people process serious and even violent ideas through humor and internet culture, and that humor is sometimes used deliberately to mask real intent or distress.
We continue to pay close attention and revise the way that Linewize Monitor assesses tone, to ensure Monitor always alerts on this category of content, however casual, ironic, or meme-led the language may appear.
Keeping an eye on the trend of nihilistic violent extremism
One of the fastest-growing risks that Monitor screens for is nihilistic violent extremism (NVE).
It's the term law enforcement, including the FBI, uses for online networks that pursue cruelty and harm for their own sake, with no political or religious motive. Sometimes called 764 or "the Com," these networks target young people already struggling with mental health, self-esteem, or isolation, often starting on platforms like Discord as a supportive friendship before escalating into coercion.
In light of the recent growth of this trend, we have been actively reviewing how Monitor's detection recognizes the language and patterns associated with NVE. It's now a standing priority in our ongoing improvements.
For educators and safeguarding staff, here are some specific warning signs to watch for in relation to NVE:
- A young person becoming secretive about their online life
- New self-harm indicators
- An intense, all-consuming new online relationship
- Engagement with servers or communities built around self-harm or eating disorders
Continuing to sharpen detection
Monitor's core job is deciding what deserves your attention, out of millions of captures a day. Most are entirely innocent, whereas some are genuinely serious.
Over the past school year, we carried out a thorough review of how Monitor detects and assesses content. We are continually refining its system to be more accurate and more responsive.
The result? Each year, Linewize Monitor understands nuance and context with greater precision. We run these reviews to ensure that alerts at every level, from the most serious through to lower-level alerts, are identified accurately and are surfacing genuine risks.
If you've noticed more lower-level alerts this year, that's intentional. It means Monitor is catching early warning signs before they escalate, giving your safeguarding team a longer runway to act.
Rolling out a fresh UI for your staff
This year we rebuilt the Monitor interface around how safeguarding teams actually work, to give you a clearer view and make it easy to get answers faster.
A few highlights for K-12 staff who use Monitor include:
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Logging in takes you right to your alerts, most urgent first.
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Reviewing an alert opens in a single view, and related alerts for the same student surface alongside it, so there's no hunting across pages.
- Every status change and note is logged and attributed, so staff working the same case can see what's already been done.
- Districts can also manage alerting profiles for every school in one place, instead of school by school.
- Training is built in too, with short walkthroughs available directly inside the platform.
Thank you
Thank you for reading, for continuing to trust us with your students' wellbeing, and for the work you do every day to keep your students safe and thriving in their digital lives.
Sincerely,
Your Linewize Monitor Team
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