Teacher sacked after calling pupil ‘paedophile’ while holding pedometer and making beeping sounds

A teacher has been sacked for a string of inappropriate classroom incidents, including one where he made beeping noises while holding a pedometer near a student to “suggest he was a paedophile”.

Adam Evans stunned pupils with a series of bizarre and sexual references while teaching a Fazakerley High School in Liverpool.

A professional conduct panel heard how Mr Evans held the piece of fitness equipment in front of a child with the implication it could detect paedophiles.

“Sir, are you calling me a paedo?” the child, referred to only as Pupil D, is said to have responded.

The teacher had made more comments, some too explicit to publish verbatim, including one claiming a student covered in blue biro ink had committed a sex act on a Smurf.

He also suggested a pupil “sniff a seat” a person had been sitting on while making crude references to genitalia and discussed a specific sex act between “teenage boys” and “teenage girls”.

The teacher has been dismissed from the school, but has not been barred from the profession itself despite admitting he had made all of the comments in question.

Mr Evans was employed at Fazakerley High from September 2015 as a trainee teacher and from September 2016 as a newly qualified teacher in science, specifically physics.

In February last year, a pupil complained to another teacher about a number of inappropriate comments made by Mr Evans during a lesson.

As a result, he was subject to an investigation, which resulted in a disciplinary hearing in April 2018 and, subsequently, his dismissal for gross misconduct.

Mr Evans accepted all the comments were “inappropriate and of a sexual nature, although there was no sexual intent behind their use”.

He recalled the comments were all made in a single lesson at around the beginning of 2018.

Mr Evans himself accepted that he “used humour as a teaching tool but, for this lesson, due to the stresses he was under, he had severely misjudged what was appropriate”.

He had, he conceded, “treated these pupils as if they were his friends”.

The panel also heard Mr Evans had been described by colleagues as an “excellent teacher”, whose knowledge of the curriculum was “first-class”.

Prior to the incident, an internal review form on his performance found he had achieved a “Grade 1” score in nearly all criteria and was making “exceptional progress”.

The Teaching Regulation Agency panel, led by chairman Professor Roger Woods, concluded: “Although Pupil A had been upset by Mr Evans’ comments, there was no evidence before the panel that any pupils had suffered any harm.

“It appeared that Mr Evans now had a full and clear understanding as to how to appropriately communicate with pupils.”