Cornwall Street professional discipline specialist Jonathan Storey (instructed by Thompsons Solicitors and Unite the Union) has last week secured the acquittal of a school leader from the North West of England charged with aggressive and inappropriate conduct towards a pupil and dishonesty in relation to the incident report she subsequently produced.
The teacher, who was accused of pushing the pupil to the floor and pushing her into / holding her against a wall, asserted that her conduct amounted to reasonable force and that her incident report, while incomplete, was only ever a draft.
After a four day hearing before a professional conduct panel convened by the Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA), involving disputed live evidence from an eyewitness and the school’s Headteacher, Jonathan’s client was acquitted of unacceptable professional conduct and conduct that may bring the teaching profession into disrepute.
The panel noted a number of concessions made by the TRA’s witnesses under cross-examination by Jonathan, accepted his submissions in relation to recent case law on the subject of memory and eyewitness evidence, agreed that such limited force as his client had used was neither inappropriate in the circumstances nor contrary to the Department for Education’s guidance on the use of reasonable force in schools, and accepted that his client’s conduct could not properly be characterised as dishonest. His client is therefore free to teach again, and maintains her unblemished professional reputation.
View Jonathan’s profile here.