Ask secondary pupils what goes on in their group chats after 3pm, and the answers look very different from traditional online safety lessons.
While plenty of classroom slides still focus on “strangers in chatrooms,” the real digital hazards facing teenagers today are peer-to-peer, automated, and running on mobile apps in private spaces.
For Pastoral Leads, Heads of Year, and PSHE teachers, updating student lessons means moving past generic rules to tackle three specific problems clogging up daily safeguarding logs: financial sextortion, AI deepfakes, and group chat abuse.
1. Financial Sextortion: Organised Scams Aimed at Teenage Boys
Financial sextortion is now one of the fastest-growing online risks in secondary schools, particularly for boys in Key Stages 4 and 5.
This isn’t slow-burn grooming. It is a fast, highly scripted scam. Criminals set up fake accounts on popular social platforms, strike up a conversation, and quickly push the pupil to move to a private messaging app. Within minutes, the victim is coaxed into sending an explicit photo. Immediately after, the demands for money start, backed by threats to send the image to family members, friends, and school peers.
How to Address Financial Sextortion in PSHE
Simply telling teenagers “don’t send nude photos” fails when organised criminals are deliberately provoking panic and shame. Effective lessons focus on what to do if it happens:
- Explain how the trap works: Teach pupils that these are organised criminal gangs running scripts. Knowing it’s a scam helps strip away the isolation and embarrassment that keeps victims silent.
- Clear emergency steps: Give them a simple, non-negotiable checklist: Stop talking, do not pay a penny, block the account, save screenshot evidence, and tell an adult.
- Signpost help clearly: Make sure pupils know who to talk to in school, along with national tools like the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) Report Remove service, Childline, and CEOP.
2. AI Deepfakes: Classroom Harassment via Smartphone Apps
Free AI tools on phones have completely changed how non-consensual image sharing happens in schools.
Handling deepfakes in secondary schools isn’t an abstract debate about politics or fake news. In 2026, the primary issue is pupils using web apps or bot channels to edit photos of classmates or teachers—generating explicit fake images or altered media to humiliate peers across year-group networks.
Updating Your School Rules for Synthetic Media
Older policy documents often miss synthetic media because no real camera was used. Schools need to make sure:
- Clear boundaries: Behaviour policies and PSHE schemes explicitly state that creating, requesting, or sharing AI-altered explicit media carries the exact same legal and disciplinary consequences as sharing real photos.
- Reframing “jokes”: Lessons need to make it clear that creating a fake explicit image of a peer causes real psychological harm, regardless of whether someone claimed it was “just a laugh.”
- Media literacy: Pupils need simple, practical ways to spot manipulated media and the common sense not to forward flagged images into group chats.
3. Group Chats: Where Bullying Escalates Unseen
A huge proportion of friendship breakdowns, pastoral issues, and attendance drops now start or intensify inside class WhatsApp and Snapchat group chats.
Mass group threads amplify problems because of their size. When an argument breaks out in a chat with 40 classmates, onlookers get pulled in, peer pressure pushes people to make nasty comments, and the humiliation plays out publicly in front of a pupil’s whole year group—often late at night.
Designing a Practical Lesson on Group Chats
Telling pupils to “just leave the group chat” rarely works—it leads to FOMO and social isolation. A better approach focuses on bystander choices and app settings:
- The Bystander Effect: Help pupils notice why people stay silent or join in when someone gets targeted in a thread. Give them simple language to defuse the chat or check on a friend privately.
- App Boundaries: Teach them basic phone management—turning off read receipts, archiving noisy chats, turning off auto-downloads for media, and locking privacy settings so random people can’t add them to groups.
- Knowing the Legal Line: Show pupils where bantering stops and illegal behaviour begins (such as harassment or sharing unlawful images), so they understand their legal responsibility when sitting in a group chat.
Dropping the “Don’t Talk to Strangers” Approach
When classroom advice doesn’t reflect what teenagers see on their screens every day, they tune out.
Building real digital resilience means giving pupils time to look at realistic scenarios, understand how apps push them to keep scrolling, and develop good judgement for the moments when no adult is nearby.
How OSA Keeps Your Curriculum Updated
Keeping pace with new apps, online risks, and annual KCSIE changes takes hours of work that school staff don’t have.
We rewrite every OSA student course over the summer—reflecting current app trends, real case studies, and updated guidance—so pastoral leads don’t have to spend their break updating teaching resources.
OSA whole-school subscriptions give you:
- Student Curricula (KS3–KS5): Lessons covering AI literacy, financial sextortion, group chats, algorithms, and digital wellbeing, with auto-graded quizzes.
- CPD Staff Training: Separate tracks for new staff induction and annual KCSIE updates, complete with downloadable certificates.
- Central Dashboards: Simple tracking tools to show compliance records across all year groups instantly.
See our updated 2026–27 Student Curriculum: https://www.onlinesafetyalliance.org/certificate/
See our Staff Safeguarding CPD Pathways: https://www.onlinesafetyalliance.org/cpd-2026/