“Turning the bad from the past into good,” is how Bill Jenkins describes his journey from an abused child in care to founding director of Securus, a computer monitoring package designed to safeguard children from online and offline threats.

Jenkins left the children’s home as soon as he could and joined the Royal Navy as a junior radio operator. Having completed a City & Guilds telecommunications course during his seven-year service, he worked as a salesman for a variety of data-handling and communications companies before striking out on his own.

His first software company failed, taking everything except his house with it. After taking a job as an IT consultant, he became aware of the potential dangers of the Government’s drive to implement internet and e-mail access across state schools. Realising that the commercially available filtering and blocking software was not robust enough to protect children fully, he secured a £270,000 loan against his family home in 2000 to develop the software.

In 2002 he launched Securus, which not only filters inappropriate websites, but also monitors all on and offline computer use by pupils and staff for signs of bullying, sexual, racial or religious harassment, pornography, gambling, depression and predator grooming, by capturing screenshot evidence and alerting administrators in the process.

But getting the product into schools proved problematic. “We had to prove the need in every school. It was only when they understood what was actually happening on their networks and saw that filtering software was easily circumvented that we gained a foothold,” he says.

The software is now running on more than 1,000 school networks. The company has grown to employ 22 staff, with financial projections showing a first profit by the end of the year. Through Securus’ growing reputation for child protection, Jenkins regularly contributes to the formulation of local government e-monitoring policy and strategies and is a keen lobbyist for the mandatory monitoring of all computers within the public sector.

www.securus-software.com

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