A government minister got more than he bargained for when he accepted an offer of friendship on the social networking website Facebook.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, did not realise that Becky Grocott, a 17-year-old head girl at a Roman Catholic comprehensive, would take the opportunity to lobby him about a threat to close her college.

The MP says that he accepted Miss Grocott’s request to add her name to his list of friends, mistakenly thinking that she was somebody he knew. She then sent Mr Knight a flurry of messages about her school in Stoke-on-Trent. As part of a planned reorganisation, the 17 senior schools in the area are to be shut and only 12 reopened. Existing staff will have reapply for their jobs.

Miss Grocott has now learnt that her specialist maths and computing school, St Thomas More Catholic College, will reopen. But she has continued to lobby the minister about the staff’s fate.

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Miss Grocott said: “I found his profile on Facebook. I wanted to get assurances from Mr Knight that the school would stay open and the headmaster and staff would remain here. Mr Knight said I had done a brilliant job lobbying him but there was nothing he could do because it was up to the local authority.”

Mr Knight, the Labour MP for South Dorset, said he joined Facebook at the request of his daughter, who was travelling in Africa and wanted to keep in touch and share photographs.

“I had a friend request from somebody. I thought I recognised the surname so I accepted,” he said. “I exchanged messages with Becky and congratulated her for her ingenuity.”