“we need to break encryption so that we can stop terrorists and CP!”
But they are taking about monitoring public facing social media - frankly I think it would be daft if they did not do this.
If a be teaching assistant starts publicly posting harmful harmful content there should indeed be systems on place to ensure this is identified and appropriate action taken.
If you post publicly you have to assume everybody, including your employer, might see it.You definitely have a point with the public facing posts. However, I will disagree with you on two points.
- “Harmful content” does not seem to apply here as the article implies that specifically posts criticizing government policies were flagged.
- Even so, harmful content could just as well be classified through existing procedures such as members of the public filing complaints rather than simply “keeping score”.
It’s a bit different when your employer is the government as they should be held to a higher standard.
I’m pretty sure the U.K. Government is keeping files on everybody
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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 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.
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”.
Another key speaker, Julie Harmieson, director of education and strategy at training organisation Trauma Informed Schools, pulled out in solidarity.
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.
The original article contains 843 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
