School hack takes 'huge mental toll' on teachers

Teachers employed by a city council say they are facing prolonged working hours and burnout after a hack which saw 320,000 stolen files published on the dark web.

Bristol City Council was forced to shut down its IT server for schools after a cyber attack in September - leaving 39 schools without access to key planning and lesson resources.

One teacher said the extra workload had taken a "huge" mental toll and the National Education Union (NEU) called for measures to safeguard staff against burnout.

The council's lead for children acknowledged the risks staff were facing but said the authority could not give a time-frame for a solution until the police investigation into the hack was finished.

Some affected teachers said they were working up to 13 hours a day to deliver lessons in the absence of the digital database.

"Although small progress has been made in the last week, our teachers are still working many extra hours planning all lessons from scratch.

"The mental toll this is taking is huge," one teacher said.

The NEU's Bristol district secretary Tom Bolton commended staff for "keeping the show on the road" but said the current situation was untenable.

"The strain is telling for many of our members, the knock-on impact workload is having on mental health is probably our biggest concern at the moment," he said.

"I had a member get in touch with me to say they've never experienced burnout in a very long career in education, but this is the event which is tipping them to that point," Bolton added.

He claimed some schools had been forced to buy laptops out of their own budgets - and called for the council to reimburse the money so it could be spent on planned improvements for the schools.

The council's lead for children, councillor Christine Townsend, said "the 39 [affected schools] day-to-day, week-to-week will have more access to the resources that they need in order to deliver that in the classroom".

She said the council would look at what needed to be reconnected and any potential refunds for money spent on laptops after the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit's investigation was over.

There had been reports schools were being issued "specialised devices" with limited access to the internet.

Townsend clarified that while some of the schools were being issued new laptops, others had been given back their old laptops which had been "made safe by the expert cyber IT staff".

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