As if schools didn’t already have their work cut out for them controlling the behaviour of their students, they’re now trying to discipline parents too. The head of Mishcon de Reya’s education department says his firm is being asked by headteachers in both the private and state sectors to help draw up codes of conduct for parents’ WhatsApp groups.
As he says, ‘Schools are very concerned about the impact on staff, and being held liable, for what’s been said in class WhatsApp groups.’ Operative phrase there: being held liable.
Demanding parents subscribe to a ‘code of conduct’ is, apparently, the best way to make sure you’re not held responsible for the actions of a parent. That is, when staff are bullied or defamed in class WhatsApp groups, heads fear the school will end up at a tribunal or in court.
As we read week in, week out, school budgets struggle to keep teachers paid adequately for the work they do, half the buildings are falling down, and the explosion of Special Educational Needs is outpacing the available provision nationwide. So is retaining the law firm which advised Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce case to cover your arse in case your own staff sue you because the parents of your pupils are idiots really the best use of public funds?
That doesn’t mean that the schools in question are necessarily being irrational. But if there really is a meaningful possibility that teachers will be entitled to take a school to court for libellous or intimidating remarks made on a WhatsApp group whose origins, maintenance and membership have nothing whatsoever to do with the school authorities, the law really is an ass.
I don’t minimise the threat, by the way: just the implied attribution of responsibility. As anyone who has spent much time on one will know, those school WhatsApp chats can get frisky. ‘I’ve seen things,’ you find yourself muttering, like Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner, ‘you people wouldn’t believe’. They make Pete Hegseth’s Signal meet-ups look like a model of discretion and diplomacy. They can make a Mumsnet chat on gender politics look like a Quaker prayer meeting. They are ungovernable, and ungoverned.
Dozens of messages a day flood in and though most of them are dull or practical – ‘is today an inset day?’; ‘has anyone picked up Jonah’s mittens by accident?’; ‘does anyone have the maths homework?’ – every now and again a thread will get rancorous. Someone will, for instance, drop a link to a petition against VAT on private schools. Or someone will moan about the maths teacher not answering their email, and everyone will pile in to grumble about the school’s communications. Or someone will kvetch that little Timmy got a negative for slapping Marco when Marco kicked him first, which is just like that Miss Boggins, and a long colloquy on the disciplinary style of this or that teacher will ensue. That not a few descend into black propaganda and four-minute hates will surprise nobody.
But the question of whether the school will have any authority to insist on setting rules for a forum in which it has no official hand is an interesting one. I’m no lawyer, but my hunch is it will not. A decent principle of free speech is that being the subject of a conversation doesn’t give you the right to control what’s said. I bet Noel Edmonds, for instance, would love to have the final say on what’s acceptable on every internet forum dedicated to the subject of Noel Edmonds, but he doesn’t, and the Edmondsweb is a livelier place as a result. And, for that matter, if we adopt the notion that the school can set rules for a WhatsApp group set up by adults on their own time, it will tend to make the school authorities more rather than less responsible for the things that are posted there.
These groups make Pete Hegseth’s Signal meet-ups look like a model of discretion and diplomacy. They can make a Mumsnet chat on gender politics look like a Quaker prayer meeting
The problem is perhaps upstream of all that. It’s with the perverse and paranoid interpretation of a school’s duty of care to its staff. Taking ‘all reasonable steps’ – as the Employment Rights Bill now in the Lords has it – to prevent staff being harassed and abused is of course to be expected. Teachers should feel safe in school grounds, should not expect their home addresses or private numbers to be distributed freely to disgruntled parents, should expect the school’s support when an excitable Dad cuts up rough about Clementine being cast as a tree in the school play, and so on. But ‘reasonable steps’ can’t extend to taking responsibility for policing the open internet.
Common sense tells us that not only does a school have no power to enforce rules for the collective communications of parents on a third-party platform, it shouldn’t be expected to. And the idea that it should spend money asking expensive lawyers to draw rules up for it is even sillier. The parents who are administrators of the WhatsApp groups could maybe be expected to set some boundaries – a good start might be ‘no politics’, ‘no libellous or offensive remarks’, ‘try to stay on topic’, and ‘nobody wants you promoting your yoga classes’ – but in the end they’re no more responsible than the school for what’s said on the group.
If a named teacher is libelled or abused on one of these forums, their recourse is not to sue the school, but to sue the idiotic parents who can’t tell the difference between fair comment and defamation. Publishing something to a WhatsApp group is publishing something – and you’re responsible for your words. If a school WhatsApp conversation ends up in court there’s reason to roll your eyes, and nobody sensible wants the police (except in cases of threats of violence) to go knocking on doors about hurtful words on the internet. But recourse of various forms is there.
But I’d like to think – wouldn’t you? – that grown adults would know how to behave online without having to subscribe to a written code of conduct; and that if they don’t then that’s their fault rather than the fault of their children’s school.
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