Super-correct Britain

Wrong to say one class is as bad as another?

"When teacher Sonya McNally posted a throwaway comment about her rowdy 12-year-old pupils on Facebook, little did she realise it would come back to haunt her. The message, tapped out in reply to a colleague’s niggle about children at her school, seemed innocuous enough: ‘By the way, [class] 8G1 are just as bad as 8G2. LOL (laugh out loud)’ she joked sympathetically.

Within a few weeks, however, 37-year-old Sonya’s world had been turned upside down. Suspended from her job at Humberston Comprehensive School after another member of staff reported her, it sparked a chain of events that culminated in the Information Technology teacher, from Grimsby, Lincs, being sacked from the job she loved.

‘When I wrote that message, I thought nothing of it,’ she says. ‘There was no mention of the school anywhere on my account and I didn’t name any pupils. The only people who could see it were my family, friends and colleagues from the school. The teacher who reported me was a friend on Facebook.

Sonya, who was suspended on full pay, contacted her union, which took up her case. She was eventually told what she had done wrong at the hearing itself. The panel consisted of the headteacher, Sonya’s line manager and a member of the local council’s human resources department.

‘When they showed me a print out of the Facebook page, I almost burst out laughing.’ she says. ‘They said that I was bringing the school into disrepute and that the governors, parents and pupils at school could have seen it.

‘I tried to explain that only those people I was friends with could see what I’d written, not the whole world. I spent most of the time trying to explain how Facebook worked, but they couldn’t understand.’

Two years have passed since she posted those words and the mother-of-three still hasn’t managed to find another job.

Source

Mustn't say anything negative about anybody in Britain, Christians excepted, of course.