Parents are regular offenders in social media bullying of teachers, a survey by Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland has found.
A fifth of teachers have been subjected to trolling, had videos posted without permission or had fake photos of them posted online. Other abuses recorded included hacking of online accounts and actual threats of harm.
According to the survey, the majority of work-related cyberbullying is perpetrated by students, but parents accounted for 20 per cent of incidents.
Eighteen per cent of the 1,920 ASTI members who participated in the research said they had some personal experience of the issue. The majority said it had been a one-off incident but almost a third said it had happened more than once and 11 per cent said the problem was ongoing.
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The teachers identified students as having been responsible for the offending behaviour on almost two thirds of occasions, while parents were blamed in 20 per cent of cases.
A colleague or member of school management were blamed in six and four per cent of cases respectively.
“It’s not surprising that the majority of perpetrators are primarily students because for young people, you know, the school day isn’t always the best experience and all you need is one look or one word and someone can get annoyed,” said ASTI assistant general secretary Moira Leydon, who oversaw the research.
It was carried out in collaboration with Red C and drew, she said, on the methodology employed in previous academic research into the issue of bullying in Ireland.
“What’s radically different now is that where you used to go home and swear about the teacher on the way, now you just take your phone out and you can get your own back on the teacher.”
She said the union did not want to be overly critical of the Department of Education over the matter, given the scale of the wider societal issue and challenges routinely involved in dealing with major social media platforms but insisted that more guidance, training and support was required.
In the majority of cases, she suggested, issues were dealt with at a local level by schools in accordance with their own policies and codes and teachers tended to be satisfied with the outcomes but there sometimes more challenging scenarios, commonly where those responsible could not be identified.
She cited the use by the National Association of Principals and Deputies of third party services to monitor and address online content and said the department should consider providing similar backing to all teachers.
“We don’t want the impression to go out that there is an epidemic of teacher bullying, it is not an epidemic, but it is serious, and there are solutions to it. There are measures that can be taken very, very quickly to address it.”
As it is, the research found, teachers were going to An Garda Síochána or solicitors in a minority of cases.
The issue will be the subject of a number of motions at the ASTI conference in Wexford next week, where delegates will be addressed by an international expert on artificial intelligence.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said there are a number of existing programmes to help both teachers and pupils deal with the challenges presented by online abuse, cyberbullying and related issues as well as health and wellbeing support structures for teachers and other staff.
The ASTI survey found that while many teachers have concerns about how AI will impact on their work and education generally, a significant number, 31 per cent, said they were using as a tool to help plan lessons while 22 per cent said they were starting to use it in the classroom.
The union’s general secretary, Kieran Christie, meanwhile, said recruitment and retention continues to be a a major challenge in schools with teachers shortages in many areas outside of Dublin having worsened in recent years.
“We used to reference it as a Dublin problem,” he said, “but we’ve stopped doing that. It’s a nationwide problem.”
He said there had been just over 600 vacancies advertised on a teacher recruitment website on Tuesday morning and that these had not included primary school roles or secondary school ones in the Education and Training Board sector.
Young teachers were not being offered the sorts of opportunities they found attractive while many existing ones were feeling the strain and special needs students were among those to suffer as specialist teachers were diverted to mainstream classes because of the shortages, he suggested.
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