Fake teacher Julian Taylor launches VCAT bid claiming discrimination
A brazen conman with a dark past who used fake documents to work as a schoolteacher for a decade, now claims he was discriminated against by Victoria’s education watchdog.
Police & Courts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Police & Courts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A conman with a dark past who tricked his way into teaching positions at Victorian schools now claims he was discriminated against by Victoria’s education watchdog.
Julian Taylor – who faked documents to cover up a criminal history and obtain a Victorian teachers registration – went on to teach maths and physics at Ilim College, St Paul’s Anglican Grammar, Hamilton and Alexandra College and Traralgon College over a decade, to 2015.
He was sentenced to two years and 11 months jail in November 2018, and exposed more of his criminal past – including previous prison sentences – when he unsuccessfully appealed last year.
Court documents show Taylor changed his identity at least eight times, including using the names Steven Bahntoff, Steven Anderson, David Sheehy and Julian Bahntoff.
He was eventually caught after an investigation by the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT) in 2015, which was prompted by information from an overseas school where he had taught.
Taylor has now claimed the VIT unlawfully discriminated against him, in breach of the Equal Opportunity Act, when it refused his request for the formal hearing about his teacher registration to be adjourned on August 12, 2015, because it didn’t take into account an illness he was suffering at the time.
His audacious bid in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) was dismissed this week, with senior member Bernadette Steele noting Taylor had made a number of applications against the VIT in the Human Rights List of VCAT, but this was the first to come before her.
“He has also applied in the Tribunal’s Regulation and Review List for review of VIT’s decision … about VIT’s decision to cancel his registration and I understand that application has not yet been heard,” Ms Steele said.
The VIT claimed Taylor’s case was “frivolous, vexatious, misconceived … and should be dismissed or struck out”.
In sentencing Taylor, then 52, in November 2018, County Court Judge David Brookes described his offending as lengthy, brazen and sophisticated.
The frauds had been committed to mask a prior criminal history, he said.
Taylor was found guilty at the time of four charges of using false documents, seven counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception and one charge each of perjury and making, using or supplying identity information.
His frauds included obtaining a Victorian teacher’s registration in the early 2000s by using fake documents to change his name on Deakin University academic records.
Taylor’s appeal last year revealed he was born Steven Robert Barr in England, and first changed his name to Steven Robert Parker in 1990 — five months before he was convicted at Melbourne Magistrates Court over 15 charges of obtaining property by deception.
Over the next seven years, he would return to courts in Melbourne and Brisbane four more times and be convicted of dozens of offences, including theft, twice breaching a restraining order, 27 charges of defrauding the Commonwealth and obtaining financial advantage by deception.
He was sentenced to a total 12 years in prison, much of it suspended.
But those convictions would be hidden when he used the new name Taylor in applying for teaching jobs from 2005.
RELATED: