The government has been monitoring the social media accounts of “dozens” of ordinary teaching staff, including teaching assistants, and is keeping files on posts that criticise education policies, the Observer has learned. Two weeks ago, this newspaper revealed how the Department for Education is monitoring the social media activity of some of the country’s leading education experts. Now evidence has emerged that the monitoring is much more widespread, covering even the lowest paid members of staff. Ordinary teaching and support staff said this weekend that they were “gobsmacked” and angry after discovering that the department had files on them. Many outraged educators have rushed to submit subject access requests [SARs] compelling the DfE to release any information it holds under their name, after discovering there were files up to 60 pages long about their tweets and comments challenging government policy or the schools inspectorate, Ofsted. Nikki Cleveland, a higher-level teaching assistant and primary school librarian, who mainly posts uncontroversial children’s book reviews, discovered from a SAR that the DfE had a file alerting colleagues to tweets from her complaining about lack of funding for school libraries and about Ofsted. She said: “I was gobsmacked that I was even on their radar.” Cleveland expressed anger that while the department was flagging tweets about schools struggling to balance their budgets, meet the growing needs of pupils without enough staff and deal with unreasonable demands from Ofsted, “nothing has changed”. “The whole thing makes me even more cynical that no one in the government or the DfE cares about what is happening in schools on a day-to-day basis,” she added. Jon Biddle, a primary school teacher who leads on English and has become more vocal in condemning government policy as his frustration has grown in recent years, said “dozens of other teachers” he knew had found their accounts were being monitored. Aware that he usually agreed with their criticisms of government, he put in his own SAR. He said he “wasn’t surprised when my suspicions were confirmed” and a file on him was sent back. Biddle said: “Is this a good use of the DfE’s limited time and resources? No. There are huge challenges facing schools that desperately need addressing.” The Observer’s story a fortnight ago revealed how the DfE tried to cancel a conference because two of its speakers, early-years experts Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury, had previously been critical of government policy. Now it has emerged that the department made similar threats in order to stop another expert who had been critical from speaking at a different education conference.
Dr Mine Conkbayir, an award-winning early-childhood author and consultant, was told by the organisers of an early-years conference for nursery staff and childminders in Bristol in March, for which she was due to give the keynote speech, that the DfE had threatened to withdraw funding for the conference if she spoke. They were unhappy about her criticisms of their policies on social media. She told the Observer: “I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I was frightened. I thought, ‘They are trying to silence me and they have so much power.’” The organisers were appalled and told Conkbayir that they fought her corner “fiercely”. But the DfE would only agree to allow her to speak for a shorter time online, with the department checking her speech first. This echoes their tactics with Swailes and Bradbury, who assumed that the reason the DfE wanted them to speak on Zoom and not in person was so that officials could “cut us off if they didn’t like what we were saying”. Conkbayir felt she had no choice but to pull out. Another key speaker, Julie Harmieson, director of education and strategy at training organisation Trauma Informed Schools, pulled out in solidarity. In an email to the organisers, she said: “I would not feel comfortable speaking, knowing that Mine has been silenced in the way she has.” Conkbayir believes that the DfE attempted to silence her because she challenged its Covid recovery strategy for young children. Like other early-years experts, she disagreed with the strategy because it initially recommended putting very small children who misbehaved in “time out” or taking away their toys as a punishment – strategies she believes are psychologically harmful as well as unlikely to work. She says she had a productive conversation with the department about this, and they agreed to “modify the language”. Following this, she was surprised to hear that she had been blacklisted as a critic. “The government wants their narrative to reign supreme, and no debate is allowed.” She added: “The more they try to silence me, the louder I will get. Everyone in the sector is so scared of the DfE and Ofsted, but we have to question things or the people who will suffer are the children.” Asked whether they were monitoring the social media of teaching staff, the DfE said it would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases and that it was standard practice to carry out due diligence before engaging external experts.