Since 2005 I have worked at the coal-face of teaching regulation. I spent five years as an in-house lawyer at the General Teaching Council for England preparing and presenting cases about misconduct and incompetence. In 2010 I abandoned my game keeping role and turned poacher, representing teachers accused of wrong-doing. During the last 12 years thousands of allegations against hundreds of teachers have crossed my desk.
The work is always different in that each individual is of course unique and each case deserves its own individual consideration. There is no set response to wrongdoing in a professional, so much depends upon the attitude of the accused person to what has happened rather than the seriousness of what they have done. That said, there are obvious categories of wrongdoing:
- Some teachers will look at pornography on their school computers;
- Some teachers will form intimate relationships with the young people they are teaching;
- Some teachers are drunkards;
- Some teachers are attention seeking fantasists who concoct illnesses in themselves or their loved ones;
- Some teachers are tripped up by the trickiness of Financial Management Standards in Schools;
- Some teachers don’t understand the nature of social media;
- Some teachers are over fond of restraining pupils;
- Some teachers simply steal money from school budgets;
- And some teachers are Superheads.
Of course being a Superhead it is not of itself a regulatory offence. But it is striking how often Superheads seem to find themselves before the regulator. I have both prosecuted and defended Superheads and have observed some common traits.
During a decade from 1994 Jean Else transformed Whalley Range High School for Girls. Prior to her arrival the school topped the national leagues league…. for truancy. Over 25 per cent of the girls never turned up for lessons and even fewer got 5 good GCSE’s. By 2005 the school had tunred itself round and over 50 per cent were getting GCSE’s with A-C grades. Her success was acknowledged by Tony Blair and Estelle Morris with a Damehood.
However, her strident determination, her flamboyant no nonsense approach and her willingness to throw money at the schools problems began to earn her enemies. Staff who didn’t agree with her were swept aside, there were large numbers of industrial tribunals and at least three cases were settled out of court by Manchester City Council with complainants being required to sign confidentiality orders so nothing got into the press.
Mutterings started emanating from other Heads in the community, perhaps a little put out by all the attention she was receiving, about the astonishing way she spent money – refurbishing the school toilets three times, holding a party for 300 guests at the school expense to celebrate her Damehood, riding around the school grounds in a golf buggy issuing drive-by telling offs and detentions. They became increasingly hard to ignore. She appears eventually to have stepped over some invisible line when she promoted her twin sister without due process from a clerical job to assistant headteacher at a salary of £76,000, a salary higher than some local heads were getting.