A Reception teacher who repeatedly lied to her school about her qualifications and sent it a “highly suspicious” email has been banned from the profession for life.
Kirsten Heath was employed at Bridgetown Primary School in Stratford-upon-Avon and falsely claimed to have completed her newly qualified teacher induction year.
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A professional conduct panel of the Teaching Regulation Agency found Ms Heath was guilty of unacceptable professional conduct that may bring the profession into disrepute. She admitted all allegations against her.
In a letter to the agency, she said: “I wanted to write this letter firstly to sincerely apologise. I know that by not being honest I have jeopardised my career and also bought into question my trust and integrity as a teacher…I never meant any harm, I got caught up in a lie that then spiralled out of control.”
She was accused of both making a false claim about the induction year and of providing false details of Owl’s Nursery in the London Borough of Richmond, where the induction allegedly took place.
Ms Heath worked for Bridgetown as a Reception teacher between September 2017 and December 2018, having answered an advertisement that specified the school was looking for a qualified teacher.
She was unable to prove her status but the headteacher offered her the job on the basis that she would sort out the required evidence.
The only evidence she put before the school was “paperwork purporting to be payslips and a P60 tax certificate for her time allegedly working in the nursery”.
When the school made enquiries, the Department for Education said she had not completed her induction year. Richmond council had no record of her or the nursery in question, and the latter could not be traced at Companies House or Ofsted.
But the school received an email in April 2018 from someone who claimed to be head of school at the nursery, which confirmed Ms Heath had completed the induction period.
The panel noted “the bare assertion, within this email that Ms Heath had completed her NQT induction year, was unsupported and contrary to the other evidence before it”. The email was, in the panel’s opinion, “highly suspicious”.
It was unable to decide whether the person who sent the email was real or fictitious but said “given Ms Heath’s assertion that she ‘got caught up in a lie that then spiralled out of control’, the latter was certainly a possibility”.
The panel said the deceit over the induction year was serious in itself but also that “Ms Heath had perpetuated her dishonest conduct by maintaining this falsehood when challenged by the school”.
It imposed a banning order with no review period since there was no public interest in retaining Ms Heath in the profession. She is also not permitted to apply for restoration of her eligibility to teach.
The ban was approved by DfE decision maker Dawn Dandy.
