The children’s commissioner for England and the minister for children, families and wellbeing have jointly backed calls from the bereaved parents of a 15-year-old girl who died by suicide in 2018 to improve online safety in schools for vulnerable young people.
At an inquest in 2021, a coroner ruled that a school's failure to prevent Frankie Thomas accessing harmful material online on its equipment contributed to her taking her own life.
Surrey’s assistant coroner Karen Henderson recorded a verdict of suicide, following an inquest into Frankie’s death, which heard that she had been able to access content related to self-harm on an iPad provided to her by Stepping Stones School in Hindhead due to failures in a filtering system.
The teenager, who had autism, died at her home in Witley, Surrey, in September 2018, after viewing explicit self-harm material for several months, the inquest heard.
