“I’ve realised how damaging the whole thing’s been because, you know, you can’t trust people,” Jen Smith says from her home in Bristol.
Smith is one of a number of parents of children with special education needs and disabilities (Send) who allege Bristol city council spied on them because of their online criticism of the local authority.
More than three years have passed since a leak of council correspondence containing personal details – including wedding photos – of parents of Send children, and the council has finally agreed to commission an independent investigation into the claims.
Smith and others – some of whom wish to remain unnamed – have called on the former Bristol mayor Marvin Rees, now Baron Rees of Easton, to give evidence to the investigation as they search for answers as to why they were monitored.
They want to know if the “social media spying scandal”, as it is known in the city, was linked the cutting of funding to the Bristol Parent Carers charity days after the allegations first surfaced.
Smith, who has a son and daughter who are autistic and has been battling for improved Send provision for years, became a member of Bristol Parent Carers in 2018 and assisted in running coffee mornings and support groups in the south of the city.
She would frequently post her frustrations with the Send system in the city on social media. “It wasn’t done in any capacity as being part of the forum,” she says.
“It was just that Send was so bad in Bristol we had to challenge it, because it was just a mess.”
Her view was backed up by official reviews and reports at the time. A review into alternative learning provision commissioned by the council found a catalogue of failings, and a report by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission found “significant areas of weakness in the local area’s practice”. “Parents and carers are overwhelmingly condemning of the Send system in Bristol because of the experiences they have had,” the regulators said.
A July 2022 article in the Bristolian, a self-proclaimed “scandal sheet”, published a leaked cache of emails and a spreadsheet of “combative” social media posts that showed officials in the council’s department for children, families and education department had collated examples of social media criticism by Smith and other parent carers.
One official says they are “working hard to uncover some concrete evidence” and lists a number of examples of social media posts, as well as revealing they had been trawling personal photos of some of the members of the parent carer forum.
In one line of the email, the official says: “External comms deduced this is [redacted] as image is the same as wedding photos on [redacted]’s personal Facebook site.”
In another email, an official refers to Smith’s “duplicity”.
She says: “It was personal, critical stuff … They were just so full of themselves. It’s almost like they had this little bubble where they thought they were really important.”
The council conducted an internal “fact finding” mission in August 2022, which found there had been no “systematic monitoring” of social media – an exercise that Smith and others called a whitewash.
After a vote by its children and young people policy committee, however, the council announced last month that it would commission an independent investigation into the “historic monitoring of the social media accounts of parents and carers of Send children”.
Smith is critical of Rees, who was Labour mayor from 2016 to 2024 before the people of Bristol voted to abolish the mayoral system in favour of a committee system.
She found him “vitriolic toward Send parents”, alleging he had “a real issue with anybody speaking out whatsoever”. Rees has been contacted for comment.
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Kerry Bailes, who has been a Labour councillor in Bristol since 2021, believes she was among the parents monitored when one of her tweets appeared in a subject access request – a process for individuals to ask an organisation for a copy of their personal data.
Bailes, whose son has autism and campaigned for improved Send provision before the allegations of monitoring surfaced, said she had been shocked and baffled when she learned her tweet had appeared in some of the correspondence.
“It feels like a big betrayal,” she says. “It’s like being in an abusive relationship, that you’re reliant, you’re co-dependent on that service, or that person or that group of people, and it just feels like a huge betrayal, but you can’t leave them. Because what’s going to happen to the support for your child?”
Bailes said she took part in protests outside Bristol city hall to raise the profile of the crisis in Send provision in the city.
“We took snippets of that and we put it on social media,” she says. “Our aim was to help the council help themselves. At at the time, there were 250 children without a school placement, so we put bunting up with with one triangle for each child that was missing a school placement outside city hall.
“Prior to 2022 the parent carer forum wasn’t what it should have been. The council weren’t really working with them. We were trying to advocate for our children, advocate as an alliance. It just seemed to rub the council up the wrong way.”
Bailes dismissed the council’s subsequent internal investigation as “patting themselves on the back, saying everything’s legal and above board”.
A spokesperson for Bristol city council said: “The children and young people policy committee is committed to inclusion and transparency and has voted to conduct an independent review into historical social media use.
“The council is also progressing with its Send and inclusion strategy, which includes investment in educational psychology services, the development of an inclusion and outreach service, and is spending over £40m to create new specialist places for children over the coming five years.”
No timetable has been set for the independent investigation.
