A Teaching Council inquiry panel has retired to consider allegations of a sexual relationship between a teacher and a student.
The complainant has told the Teaching Council that when she was an 18-year-old student a teacher at her school had sexual encounters with her on four to six occasions between March and June 2018.
She also alleges she and the teacher sent communications to each other on Snapchat, the social media app, many of which were of a sexually explicit nature, including photos of a penis and nude photos of the complainant.
The teacher was not present at the proceedings on Tuesday.
RM Block
At the inquiry the complainant gave evidence about six videos that were played to the panel at the inquiry and were recorded by a trusted university friend of the complainant in March 2022 on the friend’s phone.
The complainant said she began seeing matters from an adult perspective during her first year in college. It was then she came to believe the teacher’s conduct breached ethical standards.
“It was quite difficult to recognise that I was in a vulnerable situation. I have a lot of guilt. [The teacher] was in a position of power. He was trained. He could have dealt with the situation differently,” she said.
She said she was attending counselling over the interactions and was now scared of seeing the teacher.
The complainant further gave evidence that the teacher also followed her on Instagram and “liked” her posts between 2020 and 2022.
She also said a girl in her year in the school sent her a picture from March 2017 of a Tinder profile under the name “Muinteoir”, which the complainant alleges was that of the teacher. She claims it shows both parties had “matched” with each other.
After hearing legal advice, the panel has retired to consider the claims and whether, if proven, these amount to a finding of professional misconduct and/or a breach of the Code of Conduct for Teachers.
