Help is at hand for parents who fear for their children’s safety while using the internet with the launch today of a government scheme aimed at keeping children safe in cyberspace.

The UK Council for Child Internet Safety will bring together more than 100 public and private organisations to develop a national strategy on child safety on the web. It will become a one-stop shop for parents, providing the information they need to keep themselves and their children safe.

It will look at introducing voluntary codes of practice for the industry and advise parents about “safe” settings on search engines and computer security controls.

Research by the child psychologist Dr Tanya Byron established that many families are struggling to overcome the “generational digital divide”. Her report, Safer Children in a Digital World, found that 57 per cent of parents do not know where to get information about how to protect their children online.

Ninety-nine per cent of children aged 8-17 use the internet and 59 per cent of children aged 5-7 access it at home, with 21 per cent doing so unsupervised, according to Ofcom.

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