Social media use

The Department for Education’s social media policy and how we interact with our social media followers.

We use social media to share news and views with people working in:

  • schools
  • colleges
  • local authorities
  • children’s services

We also use social media to communicate with parents, children and young people.

Our channels

Our social media channels are:

We use these channels to comment on our policies and promote the work we do, as well as the work of our executive agencies:

We also use these channels to share stories, comments or opinions which we think will be of interest to our followers.

Facebook

We post:

  • information on announcements
  • quotes and pictures from speeches, visits and events by the Secretary of State for Education and other DfE ministers
  • the latest content on our YouTube, Flickr and Storify pages
  • contributions and blog posts from schools, charities and other groups that we think will be of interest to people who like our page
  • stories about groups and professionals who have successfully adopted our policies

Twitter

We try to tweet about our activities every day.

We tweet:

  • major announcements, statements, statistics and research publications
  • breaking news stories and issues affecting our work
  • speeches, visits and events by the Secretary of State for Education and other DfE ministers
  • the latest content on our YouTube, Flickr and Facebook pages
  • alerts when public consultations have launched or are about to close

We send between 5 and 15 tweets a day.

Messages and replies

We welcome feedback, ideas and involvement from all our followers, and we try to join the conversation where possible.

We are not able to reply individually to all the messages we receive, but we do read all tweets, direct messages and comments and pass on any helpful suggestions to relevant colleagues in the department.

We cannot get involved in any discussions of party politics.

Moderation

Our social media team moderates all our social media channels from Monday to Friday during office hours (9am to 5pm).

We will delete:

  • abusive, racist, sexist, homophobic or inflammatory comments
  • comments we consider to be spam
  • personal information, such as telephone numbers, address details, etc
  • posts that identify individual DfE staff members
  • posts that advertise commercial activity or ask for donations

Following other social media users

We:

  • will only ‘like’ Facebook pages with a non-commercial interest - being ‘liked’ by us doesn’t imply endorsement of any kind
  • may follow you if you follow us on Twitter - being followed by us doesn’t imply endorsement of any kind
  • don’t accept requests to be added as a contact on individual YouTube accounts

Our blogs

We share news, photos and videos on the following blogs:

Comments

We encourage our readers to leave comments on our blog posts and share any views or questions they may have.

We monitor all comments and will not publish any comments that break our participation guidelines and moderation policy.

Media enquiries

If you are a journalist, please don’t contact us through our social media channels.

Please contact our press office directly instead.

Media enquiries

Central newsdesk 020 7783 8300

Enquiry line for journalists only.

Freedom of information (FOI)

We recommend that you don’t use our social media channels for making FOI requests.

To make an FOI request, please contact us directly.

Freedom of information (FOI) requests

Department for Education
Piccadilly Gate
Store Street
Manchester
M1 2WD

Contact form https://form.education...

Telephone 0370 000 2288

Please note, we receive a large volume of requests asking for lists of contact details for schools, which are available from our 'Get information about schools' service (https://get-information-schools.service.gov.uk/)

Other ways of getting in touch

You can also contact us on:

General enquiries

Contact form https://www.gov.uk/con...

Telephone 0370 000 2288

Opening times
Monday to Friday: 9am to 3pm
Closed at weekends and bank holidays

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