Fit to teach?

I am in no position to comment closely on what appears to be the latest bout of moral hysteria in Britain about the suitability for employment of certain teachers, as Brian Barder and Tony Hatfield have done. Nevertheless, as a UK-qualified teacher some thoughts do occur to me. The first is that in the case of William Gibson the legal terminology indecent assault gives a misleading impression of what appears to have been a consensual relationship, and that however misguided and undesirable such a relationship may be, to my mind the legal consequences that have arisen merely point up the silliness of the legal age of consent (I know that some people reading this disagree with me here). The second is that since any man in Britain can be expected to know that sexual relations with a girl under the age of sixteen is something that gets you into serious trouble, sending flowers to her house was a bit stupid.

But teachers of all people are supposed not to be stupid, and we can wonder whether a man who is so dim as to do that is fit to be a teacher in the first place. The really important point though is that, in my view, no teacher should have sexual relations with any child in his school, whatever the age of the child and regardless of whether or not he actually teaches that child, teachers being in loco parentis. It seems to me that that, and not the age of the girl as such, is the really important point here which makes the man unfit to teach; and a subsequent conviction for fraud doesn’t help his case in the slightest. I qualified as a teacher in 1978, just two years before Gibson’s affair with his pupil. I cannot recall any of my lecturers on my PGCE course at Aberystwyth spelling out anything of what have written here, and I can’t recall the question ever arising in conversation with my fellow students. I certainly took it for granted that certain standards of behaviour were required of teachers, and I think that the others did too.

I am out of touch with current teaching conditions in Britain, but I understand that it is not always easy to find teachers to employ. I rather think that I hear the sound of a barrel being scraped in this case.

When I was working in Saudi Arabia I had to deal with a somewhat similar case. I was the Head of the English Department in an Arab boys’ school and we knew that one of the English teachers in my department was observing lessons given by Arab teachers. There was nothing bad in that of course, especially as he was trying to learn Arabic, but we became aware that the common factor was that every class that he observed had the same boy in it, and later we found that he had a photo of this boy in his wallet. There was never any suggestion of actual wrong-doing on his part but it was agreed by myself and my British management superior (who was a good friend of mine) that this situation could not continue. Apart from anything else, if the Saudis had found out about it, they’d have put him straight into jail and chucked away the key – if the man was lucky! In the end, he was persuaded, with considerable difficulty, to resign in mid-contract and leave the Kingdom with only the two of us and the Director (who was Palestinian, not Saudi) knowing what had actually happened.