Online Safety Taskforce Action Plan 2026/27

Introduction

The Online Safety Taskforce was convened in January 2025 to strengthen our approach to keeping children safe online, providing oversight and direction across the Scottish Government to ensure we are doing all we can to protect our children and young people. Our Vision is that children and young people learn, play, and connect online while being safe, supported and protected from harm.

Working in partnership with key delivery partners and informed by a wide range of organisations and individuals, including those with lived experience, the Scottish Government is delivering a wide-ranging programme of activity which will help to protect children and young people from online harms and promote positive behaviours and wellbeing. This work has a focus on prevention, early intervention, and the steps we can take to minimise harm. We want to build a multi-agency and cross sector collaboration to take forward this vital work.

Preventing and responding to online harms requires us to address the cultural and societal factors that shape behaviours and perpetuate abuse and violence. While both boys and girls can be victims, the harms they experience often manifest differently. Recognising these differing pressures is central to our approach.

The publication of this first Online Safety Taskforce Action Plan marks an important milestone in our commitment to keeping children and young people safe online. It also helps keep them safe in the offline world as well.

This Action Plan brings together our priorities in a clear and accessible framework. It is designed to be built upon to ensure it evolves and actively engages with the lived experiences of children and young people, communities and families, acknowledging that the online environment and technology is dynamic and rapidly evolving. Our approach must remain flexible and responsive as new risks, technologies, and opportunities emerge.

The Taskforce has identified the following five outcomes we are working towards through the actions in this plan:

1. Boosting prevention by ensuring children and young people have the skills and resilience to engage safely online and make positive choices

2. Equipping parents, carers and practitioners to ensure they can protect the children and young people they care for from online harms

3. Strengthening the law and ensuring regulations are consistently applied to protect against harmful and illegal behaviours

4. Improving mechanisms to identify, stop, and deal with perpetrators and users effectively, recognising that in some instances they themselves may be a child or young person and have been a victim of this type of crime

5. Providing holistic recovery support for children and young people impacted by online harm, with timely and trauma-informed support to ensure wellbeing