Touchy teacher in bid to return to classroom says ‘rules have changed’

A former teacher convicted of assaulting a teenage student as she lay in bed on a school camp has launched a bid to return to Territory classrooms, saying ‘the rules have changed’.

A FORMER teacher convicted of assaulting a teenage student as she lay in bed on a school camp has launched a bid to return to Territory classrooms, saying “the rules have changed”.

The man in his 60s, whose identity remains the subject of a 2015 Supreme Court suppression order, was found guilty by a jury of assaulting the 19-year-old year 12 student while he was supervising a school trip in the mid 2000s.

In 2016, the man was also convicted of indecently dealing with two 13-year-old girls by pulling their school shorts up and wiping their legs with a cloth before saying “nice legs girls”.

But those later convictions were overturned on appeal based on inaccurate jury directions, including about whether his motive had been “to obtain sexual gratification”.

A retrial was ordered but prosecutors declined to relitigate the case.

In the earlier incident, the woodworking teacher was found to have crawled onto the teenager’s bed and touched her repeatedly on the upper thigh as she pushed his hand away over several minutes.

His explanation for being on the bed, that he had “knocked his head on the door and fall(en) onto” it, was rejected by the court but the jury found the assault was not “indecent” and he was not required to serve any jail time.

The Education Department investigated the incident at the time and the man was given a “warning” but not suspended until the second set of allegations came to light.

He is now fighting a refusal to allow him to re-register as a teacher by the Teacher Registration Board in the NT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, where he was cross examined by the TRB’s barrister, Mary Chalmers SC, last week.

Under questioning by Ms Chalmers, the man said he had learned in his teacher training that “touching encouragement” was sometimes appropriate but “the rules have changed recently”.

“I’ve got to be very careful how I even word this, but if you’re restricting what you teach, which is your primary objective, because you’ve got a fear that you might be held, or accused of something, because you touched somebody on the shoulder, or you moved a hand or something like that, I think there’s something wrong there,” he said.

The man’s lawyer, Ron Hope, said his client had objected to allowing the 19-year-old to sleep in the same room as him and the male students and if that decision had not been made by another teacher “this event wouldn’t have occurred”.

“I don’t want to put an argument whereby two wrongs make a right, but I am suggesting that any professional that’s put under sufficient scrutiny will disclose flaws and shortcomings in either their professional conduct or their character, in my submission, it is just a matter of human nature,” he said.

Mr Hope said Screening Assessment for Employment NT had not “received any disclosures … that may be relevant” to his client passing a working with children check to obtain an Ochre Card.

“So, in that circumstance, my submission would be that the board must put up or shut up in terms of suggesting that my client is still a risk to children because I think that also fails the (legal) test of reasonableness,” he said.

“I think he does admit, on occasion, that he could have done things differently, with the benefit of hindsight and I don’t think he has an attitude where he can’t say ‘I could do things differently and I could learn from experience”.

In reply, Ms Chalmers said “the public interest demands” that the tribunal take into account the impact the teacher’s actions had had on the children in his care.

“Frankly, if young people, in this day and age, are more sensitive to sexual innuendo and unnecessary touching, well I’m sorry, but that is the environment that the applicant wants to work in,” she said.

“You can’t apply some other test that ‘Oh well, when I was growing up, professional boundaries were much further back than they are today.”

The tribunal has reserved its decision.