A former maths teacher has been ordered to pay £20,000 after losing his tribunal case against an independent school.
Joel Bevis was sacked from his job at Eaton Square Senior School in London after sending “deeply concerning” text messages to a teenage pupil.
Bevis, who began teaching at the school in January 2018, had received a bikini shot from the 14-year-old girl to which he texted back: “Hhhhhheeeeelllllooooo”.
He was fired in August 2019, but accused his employer of racial discrimination and received a £30,000 settlement, which the school paid out without admitting liability to avoid litigation.
However, he then started contacting his former pupils on social media, offering maths tuition. In November 2020, two of these pupils reported him to a teacher after he made disparaging comments about an ex-colleague and the head teacher was then informed.
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The school contacted the Local Authority Designated Officer about Bevis’s behaviour, who took the matter to the police. However, the police didn’t believe a crime had been committed but raised safeguarding concerns.
After being referred to the police, the tribunal heard Bevis “made various allegations of victimisation and harassment related to race, said to have taken place post the termination of his employment”.
However, the tribunal dismissed the claims and found the school had correctly reported him.
The ruling stated: “The claimant spent a lot of time trying to deflect from this obviously inappropriate behaviour by suggesting, variously, that it was not illegal for him to offer tutoring services after he had left the school and that the respondent’s social media policies did not apply to him now that he had left the school. However, this missed the obvious point that his behaviour was entirely inappropriate, that the school had a safeguarding duty to its own pupils, and that it had no real choice but to act in the way it subsequently did if it was not to be in dereliction of that duty.”
It highlighted concerns over the language which he used and the level of familiarity with the pupils.
The tribunal added: “The claimant is an intelligent individual and one who was familiar with the safeguarding policies at both the respondent and other schools. There are numerous pieces of evidence which suggest that he knew that what he was doing was inappropriate, for example the fact that, when he produced copies of the social media conversations in question, he removed some of the more inappropriate passages. We therefore find that the claimant knew that his behaviour was inappropriate but nonetheless brought and continued these proceedings, knowing that they were of no merit.”
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