Focus: Cleared to teach?

“My memory is that he had a letter from the Department for Education in support of his application. I was satisfied that he was suitable to be teaching children and that is still my view.”

It is also the view of the education secretary. A letter sent to Gibson from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) on January 31 last year and obtained by the Sunday Telegraph stated that Kelly had decided “not to bar or restrict” his employment as a teacher.

It added: “In reaching her decision the secretary of state has taken into account that in 1980 you resigned from your teaching post following allegations that you were conducting a relationship with a 15-year-old female pupil, for which you were subsequently convicted.”

The letter went on to note Gibson’s conviction for fraud before sweeping it aside as an obstacle — “you accept that your actions were unwise”, it said. It also noted that “you have undertaken teaching work in recent years to good effect”.

The letter concluded with a paragraph warning Gibson about his future conduct. “Your behaviour has caused her (Kelly) grave concern,” it said. “Consequently you are warned that any further misconduct on your part, which calls for action by her, is likely to have more serious consequences for your future career as a worker with children.”

Susan Moore, managing director of STC Consortium, a teacher supply agency in Newcastle, said Gibson had approached her agency in 2002 asking to be employed as a teacher but was rejected after a criminal record check revealed he had a “string of offences”. She said these included the indecent assault as well as convictions for fraud, forgery and car theft.

“I wrote (to the DfES) asking for assistance three times and phoned two or three times and all they said was that they were investigating.

“When I saw the first offence of indecent assault against a minor I immediately thought ‘no’. Then I saw the list of other offences.

“Maybe I am missing something here but surely the fundamental thing here is the safety of the children.”

Yet for the past few weeks Gibson has been working at Portchester secondary school in Bournemouth, placed there by the Step Teacher agency. Yesterday the school said it had suspended Gibson on learning of his criminal past Tobias Ellwood, the Tory MP whose Bournemouth East constituency includes Portchester school, said that the Gibson case had “exposed the flaws in the government’s procedure to safeguard our children from sex offenders”.

He added: “In my view anyone who is on a blacklist for sex offences shouldn’t teach. We are still awaiting details but Ruth Kelly needs to explain why some teachers, although blacklisted, still end up in our schools.”

Gibson is just the latest sex offender to have been revealed to be working in Britain’s schools. Last week 34-year-old Paul Reeve, a gym teacher who is married with two children, sparked a political storm when it was revealed that Kelly’s department had cleared him to teach despite his having received a police caution for visiting a website that included child porn.

How could someone on the sex offenders’ register ever be allowed to work in a school, demanded critics? What were Kelly and her officials doing sanctioning such a move? And why had the police not been consulted? In the resulting furore Reeve was forced into hiding, his wife and children given police protection. Meanwhile, the robotic Kelly and her witless department floundered in the face of the public outcry.

Officials had assessed Reeve as posing no threat, yet Kelly announced a sweeping review — and admitted that at least 10 others whose names appeared on the sex offenders’ register had been cleared to teach.

So is the system riddled with flaws? Are dangerous paedophiles being allowed into schools? Or has the inexperienced Kelly, running scared of public opinion, simply failed to explain and defend a complex but fair and secure system?

Certainly the system is confusing. The Children’s Safeguards Unit (CSU) — which examines who should go on List 99, a database of about 4,000 people banned from teaching — seems something of a mystery even to senior staff at the DfES.

According to one former minister, the CSU is not staffed by “the brightest and the best”. Staff were, said the source, “so slow they used to drive me potty”. During an inquiry into child protection three years ago, senior departmental civil servants admitted that they did not know exactly how the CSU worked: they were unsure about appeal procedures and how precisely List 99 was drawn up.

At the same time the public has no time for niceties over sex offenders. After several appalling paedophile killings, the tags “sex offender” and “paedophile” conjure up thoughts of depraved, murderous abusers.

This phobia intensified in 2000 with the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne and demands that paedophiles be publicly identified. It was compounded in 2002 when Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both 10, were abducted and murdered by Ian Huntley, a school caretaker in Soham, Cambridgeshire.

It was amid such fevered concerns that Reeve, then head of gymnastics at King Edward VII school in King’s Lynn, used his credit card to enter a website run by an American company dealing in pornography involving both adults and children.

Exactly what he was looking at on his computer is not clear. But his card details, along with those of 7,000 other users of the site, were passed to British police.

In an investigation called Operation Ore, police rounded up thousands of people whose details appeared on the site. Most were cleared — their credit card details having been fraudulently used — but more than 1,800 were charged and more than 1,450 convicted. In addition, 490 suspects were cautioned, including Reeve.

The use of so many cautions in suspected cases of possible paedophilia is odd and is one of the reasons why sex offenders are being allowed to teach.

“Why in the hell are we cautioning people for sex offences?” said Alisdair Gillespie, a reader in law at De Montfort University, Leicester. “It’s absolutely ludicrous that we are cautioning people who are found to have accessed child pornography.”

The answer, he believes, is that the police are trying to have their cake and eat it. A caution is supposed to be used where evidence exists for a full prosecution, but mitigating circumstances mean that taking the case to court would not be in the public interest. However, many believe the police use cautions to punish offenders in cases where they do not have the evidence to put before a judge and jury.

“There have been suspicions that people are being pressurised to accept cautions who might not have been convicted if they had gone to trial. That may have been a factor in this case,” said Gillespie.

Indeed, according to Tom Samain, the headmaster at the school where Reeve sought employment, Reeve had said that he “had not deliberately tried to view child pornography” and that he had accepted a caution rather than face contesting charges in court.

“He had let his (teachers’) union membership lapse, so he accepted a caution without taking legal advice,” said Samain. “He said he had never accessed child porn.”

How closely did officials examine Reeve’s case before allowing him to continue teaching? Last week the DfES would not comment on specific cases but said: “All of the evidence is looked at . . . and we consult all the relevant agencies, such as the police, social services, child protection experts, local authorities and schools.”

Yet the anomalies remain. If the police considered Reeve’s case so serious — and it was they who got him suspended from his most recent posting — why did they they only caution him in the first place? And if he really poses a threat to children, why have police and social services allowed him to remain with his own children? To some locals in his village of Reepham, it was far from clear that he should be ostracised. “It is such a shame — he knows that he did something wrong but that was in the past,” said one resident.

“Everyone here knows him as a smashing man and a dedicated teacher and he is still very much respected.”

TO complicate the picture further, a political dimension runs under the affair. Kelly, 37, is charged with pushing through Tony Blair’s controversial school reforms. She is unloved by Labour backbenchers and many local education officials.

Indeed it is perhaps no coincidence that the school in Norwich to which Reeve had applied for a job is designated as a “failing” school and is under pressure to reform.

It is not known who leaked the original story but as soon as it hit the tabloids Kelly was under fire and on Tuesday she went to see Blair.

It was a scheduled meeting, said aides, but still rumours swirled that she might have to resign. A minister confident of her ground might have stood firm, saying her officials had scrutinised Reeve’s case and deemed him suitable to continue teaching.

But Kelly struggled, resorting to the comfort blanket of a review. New legislation is to be rushed into parliament, she added. Had Kim Howells, the former junior education minister, not taken responsibility for signing off on the Reeve case, Kelly’s position would have become more vulnerable still.

Last night the DfES did not return calls on the Gibson case. But Kelly faces new questions over whether she approved Gibson to work and, if so, on what grounds. He, after all, had two convictions against his name — one as recently as 2000.

What lessons can be learnt? The system is poorly understood. Some childcare experts were not aware that sex offenders could work in schools full stop. It came as a surprise to Al Aynsley-Green, the first “children’s commissioner”, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).

Laura Warren, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: “Anyone on the sex offenders’ register should not be allowed to work as a teacher. We were told after Soham that lessons had been learnt, but nothing seems to have changed.”

After the Soham murders an inquiry by Sir Michael Bichard recommended a single national register for all people working with children, whether offenders or not. The idea was to give a single reference point for all. But the government dismissed the idea as too costly. Instead it is now aiming to merge the existing lists into one database.

Should all people on such a database be banned from working with children for life? Even the NSPCC has its doubts. What if a 16-year-old boy were put on the sex offenders’ register for having sex with a 15-year-old girl? Should he be banned forever from any job involving children?

“The NSPCC would like to see everyone on the sex offenders’ register immediately placed on List 99 on a provisional basis,” said Natalie Cronin, NSPCC head of policy and public affairs. “They should be prevented from working with children until their case is examined.

“Only where a person is deemed by child protection experts to not be a risk to children should they be allowed to work with children.” That is effectively what has happened to both Reeve and Gibson. Yet still both men have been driven from their jobs.

The reality is that wider questions must be addressed. Should sex offenders be cautioned? How should officials distinguish between offenders of differing severity and risk? When should a previous conviction be considered spent? Can the public accept that anyone should be allowed to teach while carrying a record as a sex offender?

Kelly has a lot of answers to provide.