Department for Education monitoring educationalists critical of government

Officials at the Department for Education (DfE) have reportedly been conducting social media surveillance on some of the UK’s foremost education specialists that have previously criticised government policy, an investigation by the Observer has revealed.

News that the social media activities of at least 10 educationalists have been monitored emerged after the DfE attempted to cancel a government-sponsored conference for childminders and nursery workers back in March.

Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury, co-authors of a bestselling book on early childhood, were told by the organisers of the event that the department planned to cancel the conference just days before it opened because they were deemed to be “unsuitable” headline speakers.

Speaking to the Guardian following the DfE’s intervention. Dr Bradbury was non-plussed. He was, he said, an expert in childhood theories and child development with a particular research interest in play and pedagogy, not a Russian secret agent – but then they all say that, don’t they?

The event was eventually allowed to go ahead after independent consultant Ms Swailes, and Dr Bradbury, a principal lecturer in early childhood studies at Nottingham Trent University, threatened the department with legal action – although on the day a government official was still in attendance, monitoring what was said and presumably listening out for any references to Soviet-era theorists other than the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Curious as to why she had been labelled “unsuitable”, Ms Swailes, who advises schools and nurseries on education policy, subsequently adopted one of the FSU’s tried and tested techniques for dealing with opaque institutions and filed a subject access request (or SAR) that required the DfE to disclose any information it held on her.

The results revealed that the Department had been keeping a file on her, including details of critical posts on X (formerly Twitter) about Ofsted and commentary on the fact that she had liked posts promoting guidance on teaching young children that was written by practitioners rather than the government.

In solidarity with Ms Swailes, many other educationalists then requested similar information about themselves. At least nine individuals have so far received what the Guardian describes as “very lengthy files on their views and social media activity”.

Modern language expert Carmel O’Hagan uncovered a 37-page file, including what she describes as “puerile” correspondence between DfE officials, with one email accusing her of having “an axe to grind”, along with details of who she’d been interacting with online, all neatly packaged up in every Orwellian bureaucrat’s favourite piece of software, the Excel spreadsheet.

Dr Pam Jarvis, a former teacher and education psychologist at Leeds Trinity University said that her request had returned more than 40 pages of records in which officials had monitored her tweets. “Discovering they have been monitoring me makes me f***ing furious… [and] they should know I will speak up like this until I am dead,” she said, as somewhere down in Whitehall a DfE official set about adding another page to her burgeoning record.

Or did they?

Earlier this year, chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta described as an “outrage against free speech” the decision to disinvite him from giving a keynote speech at a Ministry of Defence conference, after the organisers vetted his social media channels and identified several social media posts containing “material that criticises government officials and policy”.

Several pre-action letters and a formal apology from the conference organisers later, Mr Kaszeta, who spent 12 years advising the White House, had unearthed two interesting details: first, that according to a policy that has never been released publicly (despite a promise to deposit it in the Commons Library), Cabinet Office officials have the right to look at five years’ worth of social media postings as part of its vetting policy for external speakers at government-run events; and second, that a further 15 Whitehall departments and ministries have, or had, similar “due diligence policies”.

In a written statement, Cabinet Office Minister Jeremy Quin explained that the guidance had originally been developed to help civil servants avoid issuing speaking invitations to individuals with “extremist views”, but conceded that it was no longer being used in the way it was originally intended, and could now be having “adverse unintended consequences”.

Faced with some potentially rather awkward questions about possible breaches of the Equality Act 2010, which prohibits belief discrimination, the government has now withdrawn all 16 policies for review.

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