facebook

[AnonyMouse_8885]

Hello

In the past I have never had parents volunteer or work in our setting while their child attended. However, we were really in a pickle and I agreed to her volunteering while she completed her NVQ3. She is now qualified and about to become a paid member of staff.

As a parent, she is on Facebook with a lot of other parents and I am wondering what to do about this now. Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

[Guest]

What does it say in your policies...??

[AnonyMouse_8885]

Nothing about parents messaging each other. As I write the policies I can amend it, but wondered what others had in theirs regarding this.

[AnonyMouse_7120]

Our staff have quite a few friends who are fb friends, many before their children ever joined the setting, I'm not sure you can expect them to unfriend people, we do have a social network policy and they know how I feel about status' such as 'woohoo 6 weeks holiday' or anything that may reflect negatively on their role within preschool.

[AnonyMouse_9650]

I do ask my staff to "defriend" parents for the duration of the time that they are clients - they are free to cite me as being the "big bad wolf" that has asked them to do it - we also tell parents that staff are obliged to "defriend" them and not to take offence - this way we are able to keep the professional boundaries in place. We have learned the hard way to do this as it used to be OK for staff to be fb friends with parents but then parents were using fb to try to message staff out of hours for all manner of things and staff began to feel that they were being put in difficult situations

[AnonyMouse_64]

I'm fairly sure you have no legal right to dictate what a staff member does in their private life, which includes online social networking. All you can do is stress that any staff conduct or confidentiality policies extend to online activity.

[AnonyMouse_665]

I agree it is very hard to say you cannot have xxx as friend. I would stick to the policy that you do not post anything that reflects negativity. If parents are messaging staff on playgroup matters thats there problem to say please stop and ask the manager etc. As manager I do not have parents as friends. I dont want them knowing what myself and my family are doing. It is a really difficult one.

buttercup

[AnonyMouse_15046]

I assume that you would expect staff to respect their duty of confidentiality and professionalism on FB in the same way that they would if they socialised together, had each other's mobile numbers, followed each other on other social networking sites or communicated by email.