Is this GDPR breach

[Harass3d]

A complaint has been lodged with my employer about a comment I made on social media (not upheld!). This complaint has come from the head teacher at my son's school and he has identified himself as such (fine) but then goes on to identify me as a parent (which has no relevance to his complaint) am I right in thinking this is a breach of GDPR? It is no business of my employers where my son goes to school.

@Harass3d - yes you are entitled to your own opinion. It's the wisdom of where and how you express it I was commenting on,

This is the route he has gone down. But seeing as there is absolutely nothing on line to link me to my profession then it can't possibly be misconstrued as a professional opinion.

I don't think it's a breach of GDPR just by him saying you're a parent at the school.

It is a breach if he's used your son's record to obtain your personal details to make the complaint.

I think if you're that unhappy with the school, you are going to need to consider moving your child. Are things salvageable at this point?

Not possible due to our rural location we only have access to one secondary school.

As I said in my opening post, it was the GDPR aspect I was interested in gaining opinions on. I am taking advice separately on the defamation of my character & that is the route I will be taking when I go back to them. Had he just written to my employer about that one single comment I made I would have thought "knobber" & let it go. It's the additional and untrue claims that he has included that I'm not willing to let go.

Unless I sell up & move there is no other option.

School data forms used to populate seemis do not record or ask for parental employment details. In the past, maybe 20 odd years ago, they did and it was useful if you were looking for input about a certain field and you could find a parent who may be able to help. All school use Seemis and that question isn’t on the annual data form. A complaint to HMIE is very unlikely to trigger an inspection.

Isn’t it more likely that whoever took the time to screenshot your comment and send it to the Head, also told him where you work? You have some frenemies, Op.

Oh and Ofsted have no jurisdiction is Scotland.

You say

there are A LOT of false claims made against me which I need to address

Is there more to this? Is the comment you've given us, truthfully, an accurate representation of what you said, or was there anything that was intended or could be interpreted as being defamatory/discriminatory?

I can't help but think we're only getting half of an airbrushed story here...

Write an official complaint to the chair of governors regarding the breach. You will need to include screenshot of your Facebook post and head teacher's response and a copy of the complaint to your employer.

I would suggest the head teacher has accessed son's records to ascertain who my emloyer is.

It’s a beech

your employer was given in for about your son that can’t be found on a public record or if they telephoned the school and asked they should be refused this information

Do you mention your job or your workplace in your FB profile?

And you may not have named the school and the head in your post, but presumably the conversation that you were replying on, did? You can't claim that it wasn't clear who you were talking about.

You say it was a private conversation, but clearly someone on there bothered screenshotting and informing him. You can't assume that a FB post isn't going to get out, so it's madness to rant on there about your child's headteacher.

That said, of course the head massively overstepped, and I'm glad your work has been good about it.

Yes this is a breach of GDPR @Harass3d and you would be well within your rights to complain to the Chair of Governors at the school who should do an assessment within 48 hours of receiving the complaint and decide whether to report themselves to the ICO. If they do not do so, then you can go to the ICO yourself.

Separately, you have a claim for malicious falsehood in respect of the allegations in the letter about previous complaints being upheld against you and your unsuitability to be employed in education (which is an inference that there are safeguarding issues related to you working with children). I would consider making that claim against the headteacher personally (not the school) so that he personally faces liability for this and you aren’t leaving yourself open to an allegation that you are trying “to get money out of a financially hard pressed school”

My suspicion is that once the Chair of Governors finds out what the Head has done that there will be a large degree of scrutiny into how he is conducting himself and some disciplinary consequences and once the Headteacher receives the threat of a personal legal claim against himself that a personal grovelling apology might also be forthcoming.

He honestly sounds very unsuitable to be a headteacher - either because the stress has got to him and he’s suffering a temporary mental health crisis, or just because he’s got paper thin skin and no judgment. Either way he’s not acted in the best interests of your child here, has he? What if you’d been sacked as a result of his deliberately false allegations - your child would have suffered serious financial repercussions or what if revealing where the child went to school had put him at risk because the person he wrote to was not a safe person to have that information (maybe connected to an estranged relative)?

Not really the original post was about their frustration with getting issues resolved & how difficult they found getting the school to engage. Our children are the same age and attend the same school so I knew where they were referring o

Why's he done that though? Wtf?

What on earth did you say about him?

You're writing god knows what about him on social media. He's sending god knows what to your work.

Now you're looking for a GDPR "gotcha" because he's named you as a parent of a child at the school you're obviously a parent at, because of your own social media comments about the headteacher.

You both sound, er, intense?

Just to add if you need some help with drafting a complaint letter re malicious falsehood, I can’t find a template online but this is a really good and comprehensive AI summary of what it needs to contain (I’m a lawyer). You don’t need to spend any money instructing someone to write on your behalf in the first instance and if you decide to do this and want to DM me if you get stuck I’d be happy to help.

Just to be clear. If it’s Scotland there is no chair of governors and it isn’t ofsted so the procedure would be different.
The local authority website should have the details on how to complain. They would usually recommend contacting the school and following their complaints procedure or contacting the council with your complaint.

I would bet good money on this man having a narcissist personality style. To do that as a professional after one comment is pretty unhinged. If I saw comments like that about me as a professional I would consider it to either be useful feedback and work to do things differently or I assume the person was a little unhinged and move on.

If he has a NPS don’t battle him. He will not give up and you’ll waste a bunch of time and energy. Let it go and move on. Or write one very short and to the point letter but don’t respond further when you inevitably get a load of tosh back. If you live in a rural location he might have beef with you for some other reason - it happens.

I suspect that you dont understand what GDPR is or how is is applied. The school has an "we can only speak with the account holder problem".

The school have collected the OPs personal data 1) her post about the school after the Head has read it, linked the post to the OP as parent of child X and formulated a complaint and then found aditional data 2) her employers name plus address and disclosed 3) the fact that the OP has a son 4) attending their school to her employer along with 5) the other contents of her post.

The school have collected the OPs personal data and disclosed that data to a third party so its up to the school to prove that their actions fall within the scope of their policy and/or the act eg fair processing of the data that is held

No. I have never had my employer linked to my SM nor have I ever commented what my job is. Ironically I rarely use social media. I am not claiming that or wasn't clear who I was referring to.

Totally agree. Headteacher would have seen worse as unfortunately many parents think slagging off their school on SM is acceptable. Has he gone around sending letters to all parents employees who have made a comment? I think there's more to your comment than you're letting on.