Hexham teacher banned over sexual relationship with pupil

BBC News

5 days ago

A teacher who "sought to exploit his position of trust" to begin a sexual relationship with a sixth form pupil has been banned from the profession.Andrew Brook, 61, who worked at Queen Elizabeth High School in Hexham, continued the relationship when the teenager went on to university.He started exchanging Facebook messages with the pupil and later bought her a Christmas present before telling her he had developed feelings towards her.A Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) panel found his behaviour fundamentally breached the standard of conduct expected.
The teacher first sent a message to the girl, referred to as Pupil A, a message wishing her luck for her exams, the panel heard.Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp conversations continuing over the summer months as the pair became friends.Pupil A told the panel she began meeting up with Mr Brook once a week the following winter and said he "would hug me, mostly to just warm me up, but it became quite intimate and extended and he would invite me to put my hands under his shirt".Later, when she was revising for her mock exams in Mr Brook's classroom, he admitted he had feelings for her, Pupil A said.She stated that the next day Mr Brook picked her up in his van, drove along country roads and pulled into a car park where he told her he really liked her and had not had feelings that strong before.In her evidence, she said she knew this "was weird but she felt flattered".
'Moral policing'
Their sexual relationship started the same month with Mr Brook driving them somewhere remote in his van.Pupil A said they would "park up, put the back seats down, pull the curtains round, then he would tell me to lie down and take my clothes off and we would have sex".The panel heard that in May or June of that year, Mr Brook told the girl he loved her.She started university that September, with Pupil A saying the "relationship was sexual when he came to see me and he would bring wine, beer or gin and tonic in a can".In his written response to the panel, Mr Brook described the TRA investigation into events during Pupil A's time at university as "moral policing", adding it was a "private matter governed by privacy laws between two consenting adults and should stay that way".The panel determined that, even though Pupil A may have been over the age of 18 when the majority of the findings against Mr Brook took place, she was still considered to be a student at the school until 31 August of the year she left.It said that "clearly amounted to a failure to maintain appropriate professional boundaries".Although accepting Pupil A's evidence that the relationship was consensual, the panel said there had been a "clear power imbalance throughout" and that continued when the girl moved to university.They said Mr Brook had shown "a complete lack of insight and remorse" and that there was no evidence his "concerning and deep-seated attitude to personal relationships with pupils would, or could, change".The prohibition order imposed prevents him from teaching in England again.
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