S Ansell

All you are saying is, 'give me children & I will turn them into Pavlovian dogs',ALL submissive, All obedient, ALL conformist, ALL totally brain dead & ALL unable to think for themselves.
Exactly the same indoctrination that breeds terrorist.
No one in their right mind needs or wants that sort of 'education'it's the
'same' type of teaching, that religion uses, to 'poison' the minds of people of any age.
Give me a generation of these children & I will turn this country upside down, from it's current pathetic state.

Who can blame these yougsters.
It's what 'education' is for & it shows that they are able to use their grey matter,once they have been taught the rudimenteries.
I myself use a portable browser,combined with a proxy server for a search engine,simply because, the big boys are ALL shackled by governments.
Even with Windows 7,I am very careful to disable or delete any Logs which will be used by M$ & the data passed to 'homeland security', the American GRU.
Don't forget,amonst everything, ALL phone calls & emails are recorded & kept for at least 12months by the UK government & MORE IMPORTANTLY, that data is then GIVEN to the USA Gov't.

Solution = Proper Parenting.

As a former teacher now retired from all forms of insanity except that of my bride, I'd pose this question to you.

Why do you assume "proper teaching" takes place only in the classroom?

What the world needs far more than proper teaching technique in class is proper and responsible full time parents. Parents who are fully engaged when it comes to their children and are fully aware of their activities. I find it simply incredible that you believe teachers can be the full solution. Come on! Do you as a teacher have the time and resources to support every child in the manner they need as they mature? I certainly didn't although many of my students wanted me to. Wanted me to because of what was missing at home.

Teachers, like wardens, will always be running in failure mode when problems of all sort are created in the years before they even met the "student".

The problem is the schools are trying to block the bad things, and of course you can't keep up with them.

What they need to do is have a proper network, with a firewall and a proxy. The proxy is the only device that is allowed access to the outside world. Now configure the proxy in a block everything mode except sites on a white list.
As this is a school is should not be too hard to define a list of approved sources of information/news.
If a student needs access to anything else they can request the URL to be unblocked.
If all the schools got together and implemented some kind of white list sharing it wouldn't be long before everything the students needed would be accessible.

Then again, if the schools co-operated and shared the current black-list system, the current external proxies would quickly end up on the black lists.

This already happening like routine back in 10 years ago when was in school.

What year are you [management ppl] come from? 1800s?

As someone who works in education, there's a very simple solution which solves this perfectly:

PROPER TEACHING!

A teacher, with the help of a support teacher or even an LSA/TA, can easily monitor 20-25 ICT pupils in a well-designed classroom. If anyone breaks the established rules, the teacher can remotely control their computer, log it off and ban their logon or just remove their net access.

You don't need to get everyone every time either. It's quite possible to catch pupils using tunnelling proxies or those website based ones and very fun too actually to catch the smug little gits.

Relying on just technology will always fail. If you want to stop pupils taking the smeg, you have to reinforce rules and punish severely the ones who break the rules.

When you do that, the pupils actually learn rather than waste their and your time.

Dear BECTA,
The kids are far smarter than you will ever be about tech.

That is all.
-Ax

I remember my time in front of school computers was often spent pushing the limits of their security. Not even because I wanted to - simply because it got in the way so often. Even some resources we were asked to use by teaching staff were blocked. Bypassing the stupid security was a daily activity, just to get things done. They should stop wasting the time and money, give up and just provide Internet. In my experience if teens want something from the net, they're going to get it. The kids at the school down the road even installed a back door on one of their servers, so they could micro-manage the situation. Admins would be surprised.

Not for its efficiency, of course, but for its usefulness in the long run.
After all, this blocking fad has already ingrained in those kids the desire to find a workaround, in other words, it has made them interested in circumventing a thing that they feel impedes their liberty.
A great life lesson, there, and well worth an A.
Of course, what they do with the stuff is another matter, but such is the risk of knowledge. That is why education is paramount, and there can never be enough of it.

are tasked with administering the network in some schools. So I'd also ask the kids whether they've heard what the root / [user with RID=500] password is...

Commonly used, as well as bootable thumb drives with browsers having the private browsing feature. teens can be very inventive when it comes to getting what they want.