How ‘outstanding’ educator Neil Lennie was living a 50-year lie
For a remarkable 50 years, Neil Lennie infiltrated some of Melbourne’s top private schools claiming to carry the secret of VCE results. But in reality, the fraudster actually spent those decades convincing families to follow him on the path to academic success when he never had any of his own.
Police & Courts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Police & Courts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Neil Lennie stared down the barrel of a Sri Lankan TV news camera and was asked his secret to success.
Cutting a fine figure in a sharp black suit, a white pocket square and slicked back grey hair, he looked the part.
Dr Lennie, the decade-long principal of his own new age private school in Melbourne.
He was a guest at the swanky international education summit in Colombo in 2014, a chance for Australian institutions to spruik their high-end offerings thanks to the Australian government.
Lennie posed for photos and shook hands with high schoolers who one day hoped to be his students.
The trip was just one of many transnational recruitment drives he would go on, touting his school’s successes while boasting his own personal brand: Lennie, the distinguished educator.
And he had the resume to back it up, helpfully printed on golden pamphlets and handed to prospective students.
Dr Neil Lennie was a “well-known and highly respected educator, not only in Melbourne but around Australia and overseas”, the pamphlet read.
Once a principal of elite private schools Mount Scopus and Overnewton College, he claimed, with an alphabet of postnominals – MA, B. ED, PHD, DipBus, FAIM, MACE, just to name a few.
Students were told if they came to his school in Melbourne, they were “guaranteed” entrance into Australia’s prestigious universities – or repeat their studies “free of charge”!
To those on the outside, he had it all worked out.
The TV interviewer asked him, what was his special secret?
Lennie shot the camera a wry smile.
“We know the secrets, and there definitely are secrets about getting good results.”
Lennie’s secret was this: it was all a lie.
A teenage Lennie only lasted a year in a Bachelor of Science at the University of Melbourne before being suspended for flunking three out of four subjects.
It was the late 60s and seemingly the end to his legitimate academic pursuits.
A decade on, he walked into the offices of Mount Scopus brandishing an impressive resume.
His credentials included a Bachelor of Applied Science from RMIT, 13 years experience at local high schools and most importantly – a teacher registration number with the Council of Public Education.
He was hired.
And so began Lennie’s long career of deceit.
Do you know more? Email Genevieve or Ashley
Ask Lennie’s old students and colleagues about him, and you’ll get different results.
He was either talented, charming, charismatic and popular.
Or he was a bully, pompous, a “really nasty man”.
At Mount Scopus, the ambitious physics teacher was given the boot for insubordination.
Whispers ran wild of a campaign to undermine the new principal.
At a farewell luncheon with hundreds of his colleagues, Lennie stood up and gave his parting words.
“He just let loose,” an observer recalls.
It was a minutes long blasting of the school and it’s leadership in a speech that poisoned the atmosphere through the summer holidays.
So toxic was his final farewell that staff had to be counselled back on track when they returned to work in the new year.
“It was sheer, raw vindictiveness – very uncomfortable,” the observer said.
“I wasn’t all that surprised.”
Lennie moved on to Haileybury then Caulfield Grammar, a former colleague noting, “clearly his sullied reputation at Mount Scopus didn’t follow him”.
When he moved to Overnewton Anglican College in 1997 he would quickly fill the shoes of a recently departed deputy principal.
One of his more memorable moments during his short three-year stint was standing up at a parent information night about compulsory notebook computers.
He told parents if they couldn’t afford it, they couldn’t be in a school like this.
Lennie was sacked from that job too.
He and then-principal Lesley Bell sued the college for unfair dismissal in 2000 but dropped the case a year later.
It would be the last time Lennie would teach at a school where he had to answer to somebody else.
Four years later, he launched his own brand of teaching in the form of an alternative school in Melbourne’s CBD: New Generation College.
He dubbed the school “the VCE experts” and did away with “distractions” like sports days, religious holidays and camps.
He described to one prospective staff member the approach was “a bit like the Wild West.”
By this stage, he had begun to call himself “Dr Lennie”.
The title gave him an air of someone highly educated, who knew the system inside out, the former colleague said.
“Neil is the kind of person that talks with such confidence and authority he can make you believe just about anything,” they said.
The former staffer recalls interviewing with Lennie in his office.
“He said to me, ‘look I don’t believe in red tape and bureaucracy’ and I thought that was a weird thing to say in an interview,” they said.
“He never liked to deal with regulatory bodies,
“Now I understand why.”
A fluorescent white sign on Elizabeth St pointed students to level 6.
One boy who walked through those doors would take out an intervention order against his female teacher, who continues to face charges for allegedly stalking him.
The school wanted to task a Chinese national who couldn’t speak English with caring for the welfare of its students – his visa was rejected by the government.
And a fight carried on through fair work over tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages to staff.
In 2014 – the same year Lennie told the Sri Lankan interviewer he was looking for “good students” – his school was being investigated by the regulator for posing an unacceptable risk to the children in its care.
He would soon be fired from the school he set up.
A year later, its doors would be forced shut over welfare concerns and Lennie would confess to a court he didn’t have the right to teach there.
But it would take another five years for the depths of his deception to be unveiled by Victoria Police, who learned it wasn’t just for five years Lennie failed to hold a valid teaching registration.
Lennie had spent five decades convincing children and colleagues to follow him on the path to academic success when he’d never had any of his own.
“That’s one thing you can’t take away from him,” said one former colleague, who always thought Lennie was an “outstanding” teacher.
“You could have fooled me.”
FAKE PRINCIPAL ADMITS TO 50-YEAR FRAUD