Teacher’s pet: sue or prosecute predator teachers, students told

Child protection advocate Hetty Johnston urges former Cromer High students to go to police or a lawyer about predator teachers.

Bravehearts Founder Hetty Johnston. Picture: Peter Wallis

Leading child protection advocate Hetty Johnston says former Cromer High students should go to police or a lawyer about predator teachers, as a pattern of disturbing behaviour emerges.

The Australian’s podcast series The Teacher’s Pet last week revealed allegations that at least six teachers were in sexual relationships with teenage girls when murder suspect Chris Dawson taught there in the 1980s.

One teacher climbed through a student’s window at night and others supplied drugs and alcohol to pupils aged 15 and 16 at the school, on Sydney’s northern beaches. But it wasn’t only girls targeted. Former Cromer High art teacher Peter Wayne Scott, who once produced rock videos for some of Australia’s biggest bands, drugged and abused young boys.

Scott was sentenced to 14 years’ jail in 2014 for the sexual abuse of five male students from 1984 to 1986. They were aged from 11 to 16.

The producer of videos for the Divinyls, Mental as Anything and The Choirboys, Scott had shared cannabis with the boys before his assaults on the school’s grounds or in his panel van and home. One victim told of later enduring an ­addiction to heroin for 23 years.

In a separate case, Robert Ian Drummond was an English teacher at Cromer High when arrested in 2007 for using a hidden camera to film up the skirt of a 14-year-old girl at a mall. Police found a similar video of a 16-year-old girl at his home, and a court was initially told there “could be in excess of 3000 females” in his footage.

He was convicted of possessing and producing child pornography and sentenced to a suspended four-month jail term. The NSW Department of Education yesterday could not immediately say how long Drummond and Scott worked at Cromer High. Ms Johnston, the founder of Bravehearts, said the number of incidents linked to the school was alarming.

“I would encourage (victims) to come forward and notify police and to pursue it criminally and civilly,” she said. “These people are probably still out there and probably still offending. This knowledge and experience these people have will help to protect this generation of children from those same people.”

The podcast series is investigating the 1982 disappearance of Lyn Dawson. Two coroners have found she was murdered by her husband Chris, who has never been charged and maintains his innocence.

The Teacher’s pet podcast series

While working as a physical education teacher at Cromer High, Mr Dawson was in a relationship with a 16-year-old student, Joanne Curtis.

Steve Kerin, an experienced compensation lawyer, has said harmed students could launch a claim against the Education Department or through the national redress scheme. In a civil case it was “no defence that the girl was 16 and consenting”, he said.

A department spokesman said it could investigate in cases where teachers were still employees. Schools were always obliged to report alleged criminal conduct but during the 1970s and 80s “there were not the detailed ­reporting policies that exist today and there was no departmental ­investigative unit”.

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