An indebted teacher who was convicted of stealing money meant for school trips to the theatre has been banned from the profession.
Andrew Cowey, who taught at Dene Community School, in County Durham, was ordered to pay £5,000 in compensation and given a 12-month community order in 2017.
Now, the Teaching Regulation Agency has banned the 28-year-old from teaching indefinitely.
Its report, published today, says he falsely recorded some pupils as attending the trips for free, or using funding from the Friends of Dene charity, and kept the money for himself.
The report says Mr Cowley deleted the school trip funding spreadsheets from the school’s electronic systems to stop others seeing which pupils had paid money, and amended letters to pupils’ parents about the cost of one trip to try to hide how much money was missing.
In April 2017, his headteacher told him not to take any more money from pupils for trips, but he nevertheless took £170 from a pupil, and gave a false explanation of why he had taken this money home.
He was convicted of theft at Durham Crown Court in December 2017, after pleading guilty.
Today’s report says his conduct “clearly fell significantly short of the standards expected of the profession over a lengthy period of time”.
It notes that Mr Cowey had a “previously good history”, and has said he was suffering from emotional difficulties at the time.
It adds: “The panel noted that Mr Cowey was a teacher towards the beginning of his career and that he had admitted all of the allegations, which indicated some insight into his actions.
“The panel also noted that he had pleaded guilty before Durham Crown Court and, in his written statement, had indicated some remorse including that he had been ‘disgusted’ by his behaviour, which had arisen from the debt in which he had found himself.”
Alan Meyrick, who made the final decision on behalf of the DfE, approved the panel’s recommendation that Mr Cowley be banned from teaching indefinitely, but be allowed to ask for the prohibition to be set aside after five years.
