Alma Economics was commissioned by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) to conduct a feasibility study to identify potential approaches for the implementation of a large-scale process and impact evaluation of e-safety education.

Our approach was to first understand the context of online safety provision by investigating the range of programmes and resources available to schools, and then assess a shortlist of methods that could be used to evaluate them.

To map e-safety provision in England and Wales, we carried out an online survey of schools and interviewed a range of key stakeholders, including representatives from the Department for Education, e-safety providers and Ofsted. The information collated allowed us to produce a database of 73 e-safety programmes for use by future evaluators.

We then assessed a list of evaluation methods against the following criteria: robustness, ethical considerations, the disruption to schools, the overall data burden, and resources. This analysis concluded with the recommendation of specific non-experimental evaluation methods.