Liberal Vision

Double standards as school teacher’s internet mistake leads to sacking

Leonora Rustamova, a teacher in West Yorkshire,was suspended recently when a book she wrote “Stop! Don’t Read This!” was accidentally published on the internet. The story, which includes underage drinking, hints of drug use and “pupil fantasies” was written by “Miss Rusty” specifically for and about the five male pupils in her class.

When I first heard the story a month or so ago I dismissed it as another young teacher with bad judgement who had overstepped the boundary or teacher/pupil relationships.

But I was wrong. Today I listened to the excellent Victoria Derbyshire programme on radio 5 live where the teacher in question, along with one of her ex-students, was  interviewed. And I was literally bowled over. This is a quite brilliant teacher who, when faced with matter of trying to engage five disaffected 15 and 16 year old boys in their last few months of school, came to the conclusion that she had to do something quite exceptional to engage her students. These young men were only in school two days a week, and had faced exclusion after exclusion from a system that had all but given up on them. So she engaged with them, took it upon herself, in her own time,  to write a story about them and their lives, including language and ideas that they could relate to. Yes it was a bit racey in places, yes it had bad language, yes it even involved passages where the boys fantasised about the teacher. But it worked ! These young men actually started to read on their own, in their own time – and engaged their parents in the book. I didnt know the education system had such daring, brilliant, caring teachers still in it.  

And to be clear, all this was done with the support of the head teacher.

What went wrong was when she attempted to have copies of the book printed and bound to give to the boys as a memento of their time at school. The book was mistakenly published online, after her husband found a website that would print copies. As she had broken confidentiality rules (it is said that the pupils could clearly be identified in the book) she was sacked.

It’s clear that a small but vocal minority of narrow-minded parents and do-gooders got very hot under the collar when they found out about Miss Rusty’s unorthodox teaching methods – though I can find no reference to any criticism or complaint from the boy’s parents anywhere.  Just a lot of people being outraged “on their behalf”.

So the system (desperately short of good teachers) loses a brilliant , creative hard working school teacher because of one mistake .

In a system of ever-tightening “rules of conduct” that the government requires schools to implement I am sure the school believed that they had no option but to sack her. Shame on them. Shame on the system.

What I find galling is that we have just been through weeks of listening to one MP after another admitting to “making a mistake” about their expenses. Most of them will walk away from this with not so much as a slap on the wrist. A teacher (or to be more accurate her husband) makes a mistake – (and with no complaint from the “victims”) and the teacher gets sacked.

One rule for the MPs another law for the rest of us.