Cases & Press Reports

This is by Andrew and is rather more lawyerly than our usual updates, and (unusually) we have enabled comments. 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...

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...

This was the anguished response of a teacher to a recent decision to end his teaching career and prohibit him for the minimum two year period.  And I struggled to give him a good answer.   Unlike factual findings which rest with the panel, the final decision on...

2020 has been a tough year for all, but especially for teachers if our growing stream of enquiries is representative. School managers seem to be disciplining for minor mistakes and 2021 saw the TRA back into its business of referring and prohibiting, with experienced...