Sue Cowley, an education expert who runs training for schools, tweeted her response to the records she had been sent under her name this week: “Excuse my language but WTAF [what the actual fuck] are the DfE doing spending taxpayer money conducting surveillance on critics of government policy on here?”
Disgraceful. Reminds me of another scandal this time the Labour run Council of Bristol that was caught spying on parents of children with special educational needs (SEND) because they criticised the council.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-64404875.amp
WTF is wrong with these people?
This is deeply troubling in what is supposed to be a free society.
Education is a fundamental… But it has never been, and never will be, a one-size-fits-all thing, and trying to impose an Authoritarian View and suppressing other ideas, is just wrong, and bad.
Perhaps I should request a disclosure of what they have on me : I have been critical of nonsensical testing in the past (though I think that some sort of baseline assessment is needed, and has always been done in some form).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury, co-authors of a bestselling book on early childhood, were told by the organisers of a government-sponsored event for childminders and nursery workers, which they were due to speak at in March, that the DfE planned to cancel the conference just days before it opened because they were deemed to be “unsuitable” headline speakers.
Speaking to the Observer, Bradbury, principal lecturer in early childhood studies at Nottingham Trent University, said: “I received a phone call from the organisers saying there were some concerns about us being speakers.
Swailes, an independent consultant who advises schools and nurseries on early years education, was so shocked that she filed a subject access request, requiring the DfE to disclose any documents it held on her.
Dr Pam Jarvis, a former teacher and education psychologist who has now retired from Leeds Trinity University, said that her request had returned more than 40 pages of records in which officials had monitored her tweets, focusing in particular on her criticisms of the department’s controversial new baseline assessments for four-year-olds in their first term at school.
One modern languages expert, Carmel O’Hagan, uncovered an email from DfE officials accusing her of having “an axe to grind” on Twitter, now rebranded as X, and an Excel spreadsheet in which the department detailed who she interacted with.
Sue Cowley, an education expert who runs training for schools, tweeted her response to the records she had been sent under her name this week: “Excuse my language but WTAF [what the actual fuck] are the DfE doing spending taxpayer money conducting surveillance on critics of government policy on here?”
The original article contains 712 words, the summary contains 271 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Another stark reminder of how Hitler got into power.
Sounds like a potential GDPR breach? What genuine business grounds could they be storing that data on people? Even if it is in a spreadsheet on someone’s computer, it’s still not right.
