\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve realised how damaging the whole thing\u2019s been because, you know, you can\u2019t trust people,\u201d Jen Smith says from her home in Bristol.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
More than three years have passed since a leak of council correspondence containing personal details \u2013 including wedding photos \u2013 of parents of Send children, and the council has finally agreed to commission an independent investigation into the claims.<\/p>\n
Smith and others \u2013 some of whom wish to remain unnamed \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
They want to know if the \u201csocial media spying scandal\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She would frequently post her frustrations with the Send system in the city on social media. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t done in any capacity as being part of the forum,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just that Send was so bad in Bristol we had to challenge it, because it was just a mess.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201csignificant areas of weakness in the local area\u2019s practice\u201d. \u201cParents and carers are overwhelmingly condemning of the Send system in Bristol because of the experiences they have had,\u201d the regulators said.<\/p>\n
A July 2022 article in the Bristolian, a self-proclaimed \u201cscandal sheet\u201d, published a leaked cache of emails and a spreadsheet of \u201ccombative\u201d social media posts that showed officials in the council\u2019s department for children, families and education department had collated examples of social media criticism by Smith and other parent carers.<\/p>\n
One official says they are \u201cworking hard to uncover some concrete evidence\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In one line of the email, the official says: \u201cExternal comms deduced this is [redacted] as image is the same as wedding photos on [redacted]\u2019s personal Facebook site.\u201d<\/p>\n
In another email, an official refers to Smith\u2019s \u201cduplicity\u201d.<\/p>\n
She says: \u201cIt was personal, critical stuff \u2026 They were just so full of themselves. It\u2019s almost like they had this little bubble where they thought they were really important.\u201d<\/p>\n
The council conducted an internal \u201cfact finding\u201d mission in August 2022, which found there had been no \u201csystematic monitoring\u201d of social media \u2013 an exercise that Smith and others called a whitewash.<\/p>\n
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 \u201chistoric monitoring of the social media accounts of parents and carers of Send children\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She found him \u201cvitriolic toward Send parents\u201d, alleging he had \u201ca real issue with anybody speaking out whatsoever\u201d. Rees has been contacted for comment.<\/p>\n
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We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 a process for individuals to ask an organisation for a copy of their personal data.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt feels like a big betrayal,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like being in an abusive relationship, that you\u2019re reliant, you\u2019re co-dependent on that service, or that person or that group of people, and it just feels like a huge betrayal, but you can\u2019t leave them. Because what\u2019s going to happen to the support for your child?\u201d<\/p>\n Bailes said she took part in protests outside Bristol city hall to raise the profile of the crisis in Send provision in the city.<\/p>\n \u201cWe took snippets of that and we put it on social media,\u201d she says. \u201cOur 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.<\/p>\n \u201cPrior to 2022 the parent carer forum wasn\u2019t what it should have been. The council weren\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Bailes dismissed the council\u2019s subsequent internal investigation as \u201cpatting themselves on the back, saying everything\u2019s legal and above board\u201d.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Bristol city council said: \u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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 \u00a340m to create new specialist places for children over the coming five years.\u201d<\/p>\n No timetable has been set for the independent investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI\u2019ve realised how damaging the whole thing\u2019s been because, you know, you can\u2019t trust people,\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[820,4647,914,1387,1018,3483,630,2517,1014,1399,1017],"class_list":{"0":"post-21112","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-battle","9":"tag-bristol","10":"tag-council","11":"tag-critical","12":"tag-educational","13":"tag-long","14":"tag-parents","15":"tag-personal","16":"tag-send","17":"tag-services","18":"tag-special"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}