Ofsted consider snooping on parent and student Facebook accounts to collect data about school performance

[noblegiraffe]

Not April Fools:

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/ofsted-facebook-pages-pupils-parents-snooping-monitor-school-performance-a7659981.html

Snooping, or making considered use of all available information?

Obviously they shouldn't make judgements based on facebook, but using it as a tool to identify schools with possible issues isn't necessarily a bad thing, is it?

Maybe they should look on rate my teacher too?

Parents sounding off about schools on social media is hardly a reliable source of information.

I agree. You wouldn't want to decide ratings or pay rises based on it. However if they see a level of disquiet I could see that adding to other concerns to trigger a further look perhaps?

It's a resource that's open to view by anyone. Lots of people use facebook to check people out, eg prospective employers, potential boyfriends etc. I think I've seen reports of people identifying fraudsters by monitoring facebook. Isn't Ofsted just moving with the times? (As long as they don't take everything they read as 100% accurate.)

It's also potentially open to misuse. Bunch of disgruntled kids/parents band together to get the HT's name trending?

I'm not sure a school inspection trigger should be decided by the privacy settings of the parents.

How would it work anyway?

I use a different name. My profile is set to private so only friends can see posts. I don't put where I work, the area I live etc. I talk about schools, but without name. I am not on any of the schools fb or twitter pages. Nor do I post pictures of children in their uniforms, in the school, with their bookbags etc.

So I could have the above but name the school. Ofsted wouldn't be able to see those posts.

I am not the only one who does this. And more people are locking down their profiles. It would just like coming on here and reading posts about was the teacher unreasonable as there is no other identifying info.

It's not snooping if the information is there in the public domain!!

One would hope that OFSTED uses more reliable criteria to judge a school than someone having a moan on their facebook page. However, nothing would surprise me any more. From what I've been told, it's all about the data, so maybe they would be analysing the number of likes and shares a comment got.