A British art teacher has been banned from instructing students following a review of her termination in 2018, which came as the result of her involvement with underage students posing topless and in sexually suggestive poses.
The United Kingdom’s Teaching Regulation Agency recommended that 41-year-old Emma Wright be indefinitely prohibited from teaching. She can appeal in 2024, although the disgraced former teacher told The Sun that she has no plans of returning to the profession from which she has now been barred.
Wright was fired after the head of design at Huxlow Science College in Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, England, discovered a portfolio in which underage female students had posed topless, holding alcoholic beverages and cigarettes, with the drinks or their hands tactfully covering their “otherwise naked breasts.”
Some of the students were under the age of 16.
In other photos, according to panel documents as reported by The Christian Post, the students were “posing with their hand inside their underwear or in a pose which simulated masturbation,” “exposing their torso whilst wearing school uniform,” and “posing in swimwear.”
Wright would go on to admit to the panel that she had introduced the students to an artist who specialized in “suggestive pictures” but claimed to have explicitly told the teens that “this did not mean for them to do suggestive pictures” and that “she did not expect them to be naked, but to use their arm, face, or something.”
Although the panel conceded that Wright posed a “low risk of repetition,” it nonetheless “did not find that Mrs. Wright had fully reflected on the safeguarding implications of allowing pupils to take photographs of themselves or others in a state of undress.”
The ultimately determined that she failed “uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school, by having regard for the need to safeguard pupils’ well-being, in accordance with statutory provisions.”
Wright claimed to be the victim of a “deep injustice” in the wake of the prohibition order banning her from teaching.
“I really feel very strongly about it. I am really quite upset about it. It is a position I never thought I would be in,” she told The Sun.
“Those students were wonderful students. I have no bad feelings towards those students at all,” she added.
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