Head teachers call for levy from tech giants

SOCIAL media firms should pay a levy to schools for the time teachers spend dealing with pupils traumatised by online experiences, says a leader of Britain’s biggest head teachers’ union.

Candida Reece, of the National Association of Head Teachers, today tables a motion at the union’s annual conference committing it to a campaign for the introduction of a statutory duty of care to protect children from online harms and toughen age verification checks. The Government is considering such a duty, which has been the focus of a Daily Telegraph campaign since last summer.

Ms Reece, whose motion is expected to be approved, said schools were devoting hours of teaching time to handle the fallout from social media firms’ failure to protect children on their sites.

Pupils as young as seven were coming into school upset after finding “shocking imagery” on social media of sex, violence and abuse, said Ms Reece, president of the union’s south-east region. “We are dealing with the outcome of these multimillion-pound corporations’ failure to police online content,” said Ms Reece, a primary school head. “They should be paying a levy to support the admirable work in schools clearing up their mess.”

She said many pupils were on Facebook or in a Whatsapp group by the age of 11, despite the networks claiming they were age restricted to 13.

♦ Teachers need protection from “vitriolic” online abuse, the Education Secretary has said, adding that pupils are not the only victims. Damian Hinds said: “While attention is mainly focused on protecting young people from possible online danger, they are by no means the only victims. Teachers and leaders can be vulnerable too.”