Cyber Security and Online Safety Education for Schools in the UK: Looking through the Lens of Twitter Data

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter data from UK schools to assess the scope and nature of cyber security and online safety education efforts, providing large-scale insights into their online presence and activities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using NLP techniques on Twitter data to quantify and understand cyber security education activities among UK schools.

Findings

UK schools actively promote cyber security on Twitter.

Sentiment analysis reveals positive attitudes towards online safety.

Topic modeling identifies key themes in school online safety discussions.

Abstract

In recent years, digital technologies have grown in many ways. As a result, many school-aged children have been exposed to the digital world a lot. Children are using more digital technologies, so schools need to teach kids more about cyber security and online safety. Because of this, there are now more school programmes and projects that teach students about cyber security and online safety and help them learn and improve their skills. Still, despite many programmes and projects, there is not much proof of how many schools have taken part and helped spread the word about them. This work shows how we can learn about the size and scope of cyber security and online safety education in schools in the UK, a country with a very active and advanced cyber security education profile, using nearly 200k public tweets from over 15k schools. By using simple techniques like descriptive statistics and visualisation as well as advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques like sentiment analysis and topic modelling, we show some new findings and insights about how UK schools as a sector have been doing on Twitter with their cyber security and online safety education activities. Our work has led to a range of large-scale and real-world evidence that can help inform people and organisations interested in cyber security and teaching online safety in schools.