A quite staggering fifth of headteachers have been bullied by pupils or parents on Facebook and other social networking sites, according to a recent poll.

In fact, Britain's biggest headteachers' union – the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) – last week warned that schoolsare increasingly having to call the police to deal with violent threats posted online. It appears that schools now waste hours each week monitoring websites for abusive comments, according to the union.

One in five heads told the union they had been hounded on social networking sites by pupils, ex-pupils and parents, while two-thirds claimed parents' behaviour has got worse over the last few years. Some 1,362 heads responded to the poll (which makes it quite an authoritative study of a senior class of career professionals).

In one case, a teaching assistant discovered that pupils or parents had created a profile of him on Facebook and had posted a litany of abusive comments on it. It took him two months to get the web page taken down.

In another case, parents started a campaign to get rid of a headteacher after her pupils were shown a slaughtered pig as part of a biology lesson. The head resigned. Later, the parents decided that they had made a mistake and asked her to come back.

In other cases, schools have had to call the police to deal with vicious online threats to their headteachers. Speaking at the NAHT's annual conference in Brighton, Russell Hobby, the union's general secretary, said cyber-abuse would soon be more of a worry for a school's reputation than Ofsted, the school inspectorate. Indeed, Headteachers have already voted on whether the union's national executive should lobby ministers to develop "robust national guidance" on cyberbullying. At the moment, unions issue their own advice on this.

Where will this lead in terms of employees being victimised and harassed in their workplace – and could it become a wider phenomenon outside the teaching sector?

Hobby said online bullying could be trivial or nasty. "It can be just a matter of pupils and parents posting that they don't like what a headteacher wears or it can be a campaign to get rid of a head. There is anonymity for those who post online and they often seem to think that what they are writing isn't really real because it's on a website."

Sue Street, the director of e-learning at Harrow High School in north London, said schools were having to waste time monitoring sites such as Wikipedia. "Schools now need someone to check new media and the amount of time this takes is disproportionate. We are having to have long conversations [with website owners] in the US to have things taken down."

She said there was a "growing trend" for pupils to record their classmates and teachers in lessons. "This is also about what happens to that footage," she said.

This blurring of the lines between an employee providing a service and end users effectively harassing that employee is a worrying phenomena – and potentially dangerous if it becomes a wider trend. A survey by the NAHT revealed that one in 10 heads had been assaulted by a parent on school grounds. If social media becomes the portal that fuels such abuse, this could have major implications on its use as both a recruitment tool and an engagement vehicle.

Article contributed by Steve McNally, the Director of Communications for Equality Law and The Equality Group. He has won 34 CIPD and RAD Awards during more than 20 years of creating engaging and inclusive employment and workplace communications.

Last update : 06-05-2011 16:01

Keywords : Bullying of headteachers is on the rise in social media sites

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