“I wish I could tell you my real name or share the intimidation I’ve experienced. But I can’t. I have been told to keep silent. I blew the whistle on malpractice in my school and people say I’ve done the right thing, but have I? I have anxiety and depression. My reputation has been threatened. Who have I done the right thing by?”

Sarah* (a pseudonym) had planned to quit her job after years of being ground down by her headteacher’s bullying behaviour. But the handling of a safeguarding issue so alarmed her that she felt compelled to speak out. So, she teamed up with a group of other staff, who confided in her that they, too, wished to raise concerns - about issues that included being forced to fabricate exam results - and together they went to the school governors.

“We were scared, but the whistleblowing policy of the school said they would not tolerate any victimisation of whistleblowers,” says Sarah.

That proved not to be true, however. The headteacher left, citing “personal reasons”, without any action being taken against her - but, since that day, Sarah and her colleagues have faced anonymous harassment and attacks on their reputation, including slurs circulated to the school community. The teachers concerned are convinced they are coming from the disgruntled former head. However, they’ve been told by the governors that they can’t say anything publicly about what’s happened.

“I’m not allowed to defend myself,” says Sarah. “Because of people trying to brush things under the carpet, it’s snowballed out of control. It’s a total mess.”

Whistleblowing in any industry is difficult but, in the collegiate, tightly knit, trust-based profession of teaching, it is particularly complex. Work and life intertwine in teaching, with threads running into and over other threads. And yet, speaking truth to power, exposing malpractice and raising concerns is arguably more crucial in education than in other sectors: children’s futures are at stake.

As such, you would hope that the experience of Sarah is an anomaly. You would hope that, in most schools, whistleblowing is made as easy as possible and that those exposing the truth are protected. Unfortunately, though, that does not seem to always be the case.

It’s hard to get a clear picture of how common whistleblowing is in education. The whistleblowing advice body, Protect, received almost 400 enquiries from the education sector in 2020. If each of those queries came from an individual school, then that would mean that teachers in just 0.01 per cent of UK schools were seeking to blow the whistle last year.

Of course, that’s only one source of information, but there is other evidence that suggests speaking out about malpractice is rare in schools. Kate Atkinson, head of advice at the NAHT school leaders’ union, says members looking for guidance on whistleblowing is not that common.

“Most employers are good, they follow the law and, if a whistleblowing disclosure has been made correctly, most are thankful and will take absolutely no action against that employee,” she says.

But is whistleblowing rare in education because the majority of schools give no reason for their staff to speak up; because cases tend not to reach unions or organisations such as Protect; or because staff are too scared to speak up?

What counts as whistleblowing?

It’s worth noting that whistleblowing has quite a narrow definition: there are strict rules around what counts as whistleblowing and how to go about it.

First up, to have a legitimate whistleblowing case, the law is clear that “the wrongdoing must be in the public interest. This means it must affect others, for example the general public.”

So, just because you think your boss is being horrible to you, it doesn’t necessarily give you grounds to blow the whistle on them. For this, you would need to go down other routes with HR or union officials. (As previously reported in Tes, we know anecdotally that instances of bullying among staff are almost certainly under-reported.)

Next, only a few specific complaints fall under the umbrella of whistleblowing:

• A criminal offence: for example, fraud.
• Someone’s health and safety being in danger.
• Risk or actual damage to the environment.
• A miscarriage of justice.
• A company breaking the law.
• Someone covering up wrongdoing.

“The other thing is you have to approach blowing the whistle in accordance with your workplace policy and the law,” stresses Atkinson.

For those in a state distressed enough to need to whistleblow, this is a lot of information to process on top of an already overflowing workload. That is why seeking advice is key.

If you do jump through all the hoops and blow the whistle, in theory, the law protects you from being treated unfairly or losing your job as a result.

But it’s important that you make the complaint, in the first instance, to your employer (following their whistleblowing policy if they have one) - or to an external regulatory body if you’re concerned about how your employer will respond (on gov.uk, you can find a list of prescribed bodies you can report to).

By contrast, if, for example, you went straight to a newspaper, you’d likely lose your legal protection.

“We’d always recommend that people protect themselves by going to their union, ACAS (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service), Citizens Advice or a lawyer, to arm themselves in terms of being clear about what they’re doing before whistleblowing,” says Atkinson.

It’s vital you go to the right person, in the right way, to benefit from protection. However, the fact that you are obliged to go to your employer first, if possible, makes legal sense but little practical sense. When a teacher reaches the point of becoming a whistleblower, it is likely that the conditions in the school are such that going directly to the employer with a claim would be asking a lot.

Fiona* describes how the toxic culture in her previous school meant that she would have been too terrified even to go near the whistle: “I used to cry on my way to work. I would not have felt confident to raise any concern about how the school was being run or anything going on within it.”

She acknowledges that this meant that the problem went unaddressed, but she feels she had little choice. “If you feel you’re in a school where you cannot raise any concerns, that’s a massive detriment to the children,” she says.

Of course, whistleblowing may not always be optional, notes Atkinson: “In certain circumstances - for example, child protection or fraud - you may have a contractual duty as a teacher to raise your concerns.”

If you do feel you are able to raise the alarm, the good news, say the experts in this area, is that most organisations will do the right thing. But many argue that there needs to be more protection for whistleblowers as, in some cases, the organisation - including schools - acts very badly.

Katherine*, who undertakes freelance training in schools, has seen this at first hand. “I know of deputy heads who were brilliant but, because they’ve spoken up about something they thought wasn’t right in the school, they’ve found themselves on a capability procedure because the head wanted to protect their own reputation,” she says.

Barrister Andrew Faux, director of Lawyers for Teachers, agrees that, unfortunately, this does happen. “The legal theory is all lovely but, if you’re in a relatively small workplace, and the people you’re complaining about are your managers, what do you think it’s going to be like working there going forward?”

It’s not just fear of the organisation behaving badly that stops teachers whistleblowing, though, but the close-knit nature of the teaching community.

“In a school, you may have to whistleblow on people you know incredibly well and have worked with closely. You may also live in the same community,” notes Atkinson. “In bigger organisations, it’s sometimes easier to whistleblow because it feels less personal.”

Faux also believes there are particular pressures in the education sector. “I’ve come across cases in schools where, for example, they get students to learn rote passages for oral exams,” he says. “Now, is that cheating? It feels like cheating. But then you realise everyone does it. So, if you didn’t do that with your kids, then they wouldn’t do very well against the cohort.”

“Cheating” is a particularly complex area of whistleblowing. If a teacher got wind of malpractice in their school, should they whistleblow? And on whom? The newly qualified teacher who’s doing it? The head of department who told them to? The headteacher who’s laying on the pressure to achieve certain grades? The government? Where does the buck stop?

The other challenge for teachers is just how precious reputations are in education. First, there is the school’s reputation: when it takes a substantial knock, it can take a generation to recover from that and, in the meantime, all the teachers and pupils in the school suffer. That’s a lot of responsibility to take on your shoulders as a whistleblower, particularly as most people in that school will be entirely blameless.

And then there is also your own reputation. “In the government’s statutory guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education, it sets out that a school must take a reference from your last employer before hiring you,” says Faux.

“But if you left in complicated circumstances - you’re saying they sacked you because you blew the whistle but they’re saying you were sacked for some other reason - you’re going to have to disclose all this and that school has got to be willing to run the risk of taking you on.”

And the impact can be even more far-reaching than just your next teaching post, suggests Fiona - it could affect your entire career.

“If you whistleblow openly, in some environments it might make it really difficult for you to ever work again,” she argues.

Technically, anonymity is an option. If you blow the whistle, you can request confidentiality and the person/body you’ve told should make every effort to protect your identity. But, in reality, this isn’t always easy.

“You have to be honest with someone who’s thinking about whistleblowing - it’s usually very obvious who they are from what they know,” notes Richard Tanton, director of member support at the Association of School and College Leaders.

And many teachers may feel that they cannot trust the internal lines of communication, Katherine points out.

“In one school, the governors were all the head’s friends, so when a colleague did raise a complaint to the chair of governors, [the chair] went straight to the head with it,” she says.

Blatant breaches of confidentiality and attempts to ruin someone’s reputation don’t sound like the kind of protection a whistleblower should be getting under law - and they’re not. But to fight back against any detriment you think you’ve incurred from whistleblowing, you usually have to take the case to an employment tribunal.

“You have to suffer the detriment or dismissal and then try to remedy that under the law,” explains Atkinson.

When Katherine got caught up in a whistleblowing case herself, she couldn’t face that. “If I’d felt a bit braver at the time, I might have taken legal action. But, sometimes, you just feel too worn down by it,” she says.

Even if you steel yourself, there’s no guarantee of success.

“Those cases are very hard because what you’re presenting as a lawyer is, at some level, a conspiracy theory - that everybody is out to get your client,” says Faux, “And it’s very hard to prove unless you have a golden nugget of evidence in an email or something.”

Plus Atkinson notes that while “softer” repercussions - such as people ignoring you in the staffroom - may not warrant a tribunal, they can still hurt.

An open culture

In Sarah’s case, things are even more complicated. The detriment she’s suffered hasn’t been at the hands of her current employer. “Now we’re being told that, as the ex-head is not an employee anymore, there’s only so much the school can do,” she explains. “And we’re like, ‘wait a minute, your reassurance didn’t come with a caveat’.”

Unfortunately, Atkinson confirms that “it is very difficult if someone is no longer in the control of the employer. You’re not protected under the whistleblowing legislation itself. You’re relying upon your employer to assist you more out of good faith”.

Yet for Sarah - and anyone else caught up in a whistleblowing case that has turned sour - it can take a serious toll.

“When you look at research into whistleblowing, the people who tend to do it feel they have to because something is happening that goes against their value basis,” notes Rachel Lewis, registered occupational psychologist from Birkbeck, University of London and director of Affinity Health at Work.

“They really believe the system will work, so when they speak out and they’re met with negative consequences, the impact is felt even harder. They think ‘people will do the right thing’. Spoiler alert: they don’t always.”

And the resulting fallout can be lasting and painful - especially if you go to an employment tribunal.

“You may not get a hearing for years, so you’re embarking upon a long, horrible process with no certainty of outcome,” says Faux.

The impact of all this can be devastating for the whistleblower. “Some will have loss of confidence, loss of enjoyment in their career, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Lewis.

And that then comes full circle and prevents others from whistleblowing in the future.

“What kind of message do you think staff in my school have been sent?” asks Sarah. “The message is, don’t whistleblow - turn a blind eye and keep your mouth shut.”

So, how can we make it more palatable for someone to take up the whistle? As mentioned above, most schools will deal with claims properly, but how can leaders ensure that they have set up the right conditions for whistleblowing to happen?

First, it’s about whole-school culture, argues Tanton. “The more open and less defensive any organisation can be, the better,” he explains. “You want a culture in which people feel free to raise their concerns and they’re taken seriously. I think it’s when people raise legitimate concerns and they don’t seem to be dealt with that things get bigger and bigger, and tend to go astray.”

Atkinson agrees, adding: “I think the law around whistleblowing is pretty much as good as it can get. The process is incredibly difficult for the person that has the whistle blown on them as well, so there needs to be protection on both sides.

“With all these things, you can have great laws in place but it’s the practical implementation on the ground that makes the difference. Part of what can be done by school leaders is reminding people of the policies, and that whistleblowing is encouraged and taken seriously.”

This kind of open culture is one that Fiona has happily found in her current school.

“You would always feel uncomfortable whistleblowing. But you could do it in my school and it would be dealt with sensitively,” she says. “And if the tables were turned and the whistle was blown on me, I know they would want to hear my side. They wouldn’t just come down on me like a ton of bricks.”

Faux believes that it would be helpful here if whistleblowing could be “rebranded” at a policy level. “I think it’s an unfortunate term because, to me, it’s the Fat Controller blowing his whistle and pointing his finger and saying ‘aha, caught you!’ We don’t want a working environment that has a sort of surveillance culture,” he argues.

“Of course, if there’s a case of serious misconduct, consequences have to flow from that. But, ideally, you want an environment where it’s well understood that mistakes are sometimes made, which others can learn from and where, if someone makes a professional misjudgement, they are empowered to self-disclose that.”

Sarah admits that she has certainly found the identity of “whistleblower” uncomfortable. “It makes you sound like a grass or a snitch. Even when you know you’re disclosing something that needs to be disclosed, it makes it sound like you’re somehow the one causing a problem,” she says.

In all of this, it’s important to recognise that Sarah’s case is extreme. “In the five to six years I’ve worked in this role, I can’t remember a huge number of people we’ve advised to go ahead with whistleblowing and I can’t remember a single case of a member suffering detriment as a result,” says Tanton.

However, it is also important to recognise that we are almost certainly underestimating the number of potential whistleblowing cases in the UK in education - and that there will also be many teachers who haven’t gone through with whistleblowing purely for the reasons laid out in this article.

Those who have been involved in whistleblowing say that this situation is harmful to the profession and to the pupils, teachers and other staff within our schools. They believe schools need to make changes to ensure better protection for individual teachers. We tell children to speak up when they see wrongdoing and we create the conditions to ensure that is possible. Isn’t it time we made sure school staff have the same incentive and protection?

Jessica Powell is a freelance journalist

*Names have been changed to protect identities

This article originally appeared in the 26 March 2021 issue under the headline “Is it safe to speak out?”