Cases & Press Reports

It is commonly understood that you can only be struck off if you do something seriously bad.   But that is not necessarily true.  Recently a teacher’s behaviour was found to be  within the range of acceptable professional conduct, but his career is...

Should a teacher face their regulator for alleged conduct such as:  arranging a hook-up with consenting adults on Grindr who then turn out to be juvenile criminals who commit a violent robbery.  He was then too traumatised and embarrassed to tell his line-manager...

This is by Andrew and is rather more lawyerly than our usual updates. Earlier this year I represented a professional person before a regulator.  There was no factual dispute about what he had done, but much argument about his motives and whether his activities...

Frequent personal contact with pupils is almost always unacceptable professional conduct.  The huge danger is that over-familiar messaging looks exactly the same as the grooming activities of a sexual predator.  So the regulator often takes charges of sexual...

Our very experienced client loved her career as an effective and popular primary school teacher.  She was on the SLT and a union rep.  Then in 2017 a new Head was appointed and everything changed.   By 2021 she had been dismissed and, just into her sixties, relegated...

An irrational anomaly in the publication of decisions by the Teaching Regulation Agency has finally been removed.  From today the TRA state they have removed all decisions of misconduct where there was no prohibition order made and which are over two years old.  They...

Many of our clients are so desperately worried about what is happening to them, and so concerned to gain a better understanding of how professional conduct panels think, that they read all the published decisions on the Teaching Regulation Agency's website.  This can...

We have written before about how hard it is to win an appeal against a prohibition order in the HIgh Court.  Andrew has managed to cement into law that the High Court should usually approach such an appeal by a teacher as a 'rehearing'. ​ But that hasn't made winning...

Our teacher clients often fear the public humiliation of having their mistakes exposed in the press even more that the prohibition that can be imposed.  But even obvious errors can be properly understood by the Panel, other teachers and the wider public. This summer...

Increasingly the TRA are accepting and investigating referrals brought by members of the public rather than employers.  These can be from a hostile parent, carer or relative of a pupil or simply anyone with a gripe. In early 2023 a small but significant change on the...