Safer Internet Day 2026: AI & Online Safety Checklist for Nurseries and After School Clubs (UK)

Safer Internet Day 2026 lands on Tuesday 10 February 2026, and this year’s theme is “Smart tech, safe choices – Exploring the safe and responsible use of AI.” That makes February a perfect time for nurseries and after‑school clubs to refresh their online‑safety approach, not with fear, but with practical guardrails that protect children, families, and staff.

The reality is that “online safety” no longer lives only in a web browser. It’s in the parent messages you send, the photos you share, the devices staff use, and increasingly the AI tools people quietly lean on to save time. AI can help teams write clearer updates, translate messages for families, and reduce admin. But it can also introduce risks: accidental data sharing, over‑collection, poor record handling, or cyber threats that are getting more convincing by the day.

This guide is a simple, UK‑focused checklist you can use to tighten the basics and make sensible decisions about AI—without turning your setting into a compliance obstacle course.
 

What Safer Internet Day 2026 is about and why AI is in the spotlight

Safer Internet Day is an annual international moment that encourages safer and more responsible online behaviour, especially for children and young people. In the UK, the Safer Internet Day 2026 focus is explicit: how we use AI safely and responsibly.

For early years providers and wraparound care, AI is not “future tech”. It’s already here in the everyday tools staff use, sometimes without realising it. The most useful response isn’t banning everything; it’s creating clear, memorable rules that protect children’s information and keep safeguarding front and centre.
 

Where AI shows up in nurseries and clubs without you noticing

If you asked your team, “Do we use AI?”, you might hear “No”. But AI can be embedded in tools you already rely on. In settings like nurseries and after‑school clubs, it commonly appears in:

Writing and editing support for parent newsletters or incident summaries and accident reports, translation and tone‑checking for parent messages, photo sorting and “memories” features in phone galleries, speech‑to‑text dictation for notes, and AI features inside email, office software, phones, and search engines.

The benefit is obvious: faster admin and clearer communication. The risk is also obvious: staff might paste information into the wrong place, upload the wrong file, or trust an AI answer that sounds confident but is wrong. That’s why your policy needs to cover both intentional use and “accidental AI” built into everyday apps.
 

The “Safe AI” rules of thumb for early years teams

You don’t need a 20‑page AI policy. You need a few rules everyone can remember, and a process for anything more complex.

Rule 1: Don’t put child‑identifiable or PII information into public AI tools. As a baseline, treat public chatbots like you would a public social platform: never enter personal data about a child, parent, guardian, carer or staff member, and never paste incident details, safeguarding concerns, medical notes, contact information, or anything that could identify a family.

Rule 2: AI can help draft, but a human must decide. AI is useful for structure and plain English. It is not a safeguarding professional and not your setting’s voice. Build a habit: AI can suggest, staff must review and own the final wording—especially for incident reports, sensitive parent conversations, or anything that could be interpreted as advice. Cross check everything.

Rule 3: If it affects a child, keep the “explain it to a parent” standard. A simple test: if you wouldn’t be comfortable explaining to a parent what you did and why, don’t do it. Transparency also builds trust.

Rule 4: Assume cyber scams are getting more believable. In practice, that means your setting should expect more convincing phishing emails, more polished fake invoices, and more “I’m the bank manager, can you do this now?” messages that look real.

Rule 5: Use approved tools, not whatever is trending. If your setting chooses to allow AI tools, do it deliberately: pick approved tools, set expectations, and document what’s allowed. Closely review and ensure privacy settings are updated in the tools used.
 

Online safety + safeguarding: quick wins you can implement this week

You don’t need new hardware to improve online safety. Most improvements are about habits, access, and consistency.

Start with accounts. Every staff member should use their own login for work systems, with permissions matched to their role. Shared logins make it impossible to audit access properly and increase the risk of accidental or inappropriate viewing. Keep your leavers process tight: when staff leave, access should be removed promptly without delay.

Then look at devices. If staff use phones or tablets for photos, registers, or parent updates, set a clear rule about where photos can be stored and how they’re shared. “Just take it on my phone and send it later” is a classic moment where images can end up in personal galleries, cloud backups, or messaging apps unintentionally.

Finally, refresh your phishing posture. In a childcare context, that can be as simple as: staff know how to report suspicious emails, never change bank details based on an email alone, and verify payment requests via a known channel. Never share OTPs or other information under pressure.

Safeguarding is broader than cyber security, of course. Your online‑safety approach should support good information sharing through the right routes—meaning staff know when and how to share concerns, and who is responsible for escalation.
 

Data protection & trust: what parents expect in 2026

Parents don’t need you to sound like a lawyer or be a GDPR expert. They need to feel confident that their information is handled carefully. A useful sanity‑check is the core data protection idea of being transparent, using data for clear purposes, and keeping it limited to only what’s necessary. For childcare, “necessary” often means information needed for safety, contact, billing, attendance, and agreed learning updates—rather than “anything we might want someday”.

This is where AI can trip settings up. A staff member might copy‑paste a parent message thread into an AI tool to “make it sound nicer”, not realising they’ve just shared personal data outside approved systems. So the trust story you tell families should include a simple promise: you use secure tools, you limit access, and you don’t use actual (real) data to experiment with new tech.

If you do adopt AI features inside your software stack, make sure you can explain what happens to the data, who has access, and how long it’s kept. Frequently review and update privacy settings and delete AI chats or projects that are no longer required.
 

A printable checklist for childcare settings

Below is a “print and pin” checklist you can adapt for your staff room. Keep it short. Make it real. Revisit it termly.

Safer Internet Day 2026: AI & Online Safety Checklist (UK)

1) Confirm that Safer Internet Day is on your February calendar and that you’ve shared the 2026 theme with staff: “Smart tech, safe choices – exploring the safe and responsible use of AI.”

2) Ensure every staff member has their own account for your childcare systems and that access levels match roles. Check that your photo and messaging process keeps children’s images and updates inside approved systems, not personal devices or personal messaging apps.

3) Write a one‑paragraph AI rule for staff: no personal data in public AI tools, and human review required for anything sent to parents.

4) Run a 10‑minute “spot the phishing” refresher and remind staff how to report suspicious messages.

5) Review your data minimisation habits: do you collect only what you need, and do you regularly delete what you no longer need?

6) Confirm your safeguarding information‑sharing route is clear, including what to do when a concern arises and who is responsible for escalation.

How Cheqdin can help you stay organised

A big part of online safety is reducing “workarounds”. When staff have to juggle registrations in one place, bookings in another, and parent messages in yet another, the temptation to improvise grows—and that’s when mistakes happen.

Cheqdin positions itself as an all‑in‑one platform for childcare and wraparound care, covering areas like enrolments, bookings, billing, attendance and parent communication in one place. For parents, Cheqdin provides a portal and app where families can register, make bookings and payments, receive updates and notifications, and message the setting directly.

From a safer‑internet perspective, the win is simple: keeping sensitive updates, attendance, and incident communications inside a dedicated platform helps reduce reliance on personal inboxes, ad‑hoc messaging, and scattered files—so your “safe choices” are easier to follow day to day.
 

Ready-to-send templates for Safer Internet Day 2026

A short parent message (copy/paste)

On Tuesday 10 February 2026 it’s Safer Internet Day, with a focus on “Smart tech, safe choices – exploring the safe and responsible use of AI.” We’ll be reminding children about safe choices online in an age‑appropriate way, and we’re also refreshing our own practices around privacy, photos, and secure communication. If you have any questions about how we share updates or store information, please get in touch.

A staff huddle script (2 minutes)

This month’s focus is safe and responsible use of AI. Our rule is simple: do not put any child, parent, or staff personal information into public AI tools. AI can help with general wording, but a human reviews and owns anything we send. If something looks suspicious—especially payment requests or urgent “manager” emails—pause, verify, and report it.
 

“Smart tech” is only smart when it’s accountable

Safer Internet Day is a reminder that safeguarding now includes digital habits. The goal isn’t to fear AI, or outright ban everything, or overwhelm staff. It’s to build a culture where your setting uses technology productively and responsibly, keeps data limited and secure, and makes it easy for staff to do the right thing every day. 

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