A BOURNEMOUTH primary school is at loggerheads with Virgin Media Business after pupils inadvertently accessed sexual swear words and adult content online.

Staff at Pokesdown Primary School say the filter system promised for the children's computers has simply not been delivered.

Head teacher Jo Barton told the Daily Echo pupils as young as nine have been accidentally exposed to "inappropriate language" on two occasions following "innocuous curriculum-related searches."

Ms Barton said: "It is very disappointing and frustrating that the service offered by Virgin Business does not seem to meet the necessary internet safety standards.

"Our children are, of course, always closely supervised when using the internet and online searches are being monitored especially closely while we do everything we can to rectify the current situation."

The head says if Virgin Media Business cannot provide safe internet services to primary schools, it should not offer to do so.

School business manager Terri Jowett explained: "At one point we were being told by Virgin you cannot block a word unless it has seven letters, but unfortunately most words we'd like to block have less than seven letters.

"We recently changed provider at the school, and this choice was based on filtering, not price.

"Initially it took a lot of hassle to actually get the internet service in place, but now the filtering is almost non-existent. It has become a bit of a nightmare really."

In one recent lesson the primary school children were researching poem covers, but their searches brought up inappropriate images and verse containing sexual swear words.

"I cannot tell you some of the language that has been coming up," said Terri.

The school contacted the Echo because staff felt Virgin had failed to properly acknowledge the issue or do anything to rectify it.

"The security operations centre at Virgin is dealing with our filtering," said Terri. "But they don't seem to be able to block the language in the way we want them to.

"We definitely don't have the package we signed up for."

On Saturday afternoon, Virgin Media responded to the Daily Echo's request for a comment.

Peter Kelly, managing director, Virgin Media Business, said: ‎"Virgin Media takes the protection of children extremely seriously and we have a range of filtering tools to block inappropriate content.

"We are sorry that the system used by the school did not block all the necessary content. We are currently working to find a swift solution."