PRIVATE TUTOR PREDATORS
Revealed: Loophole that lets dozens accused of sex offences carry on working while on bail – and even after guilty plea
PRIVATE tutors charged with sex offences are continuing to work while on bail and even after pleading guilty, an investigation has found.
Dozens of them have been convicted over the past decade with victims often having been their pupils.
In one case, a maths tutor who last month admitted sexually abusing four children was still teaching a 15-year- old girl just days before his sentencing. Unlike teachers, private tutors are not required by law to have criminal record checks to work with schoolchildren.
Campaigners have called on the Government to close the loophole ‘as a matter of urgency’ as the profession booms during the pandemic.
Robert Halfon, chairman of the Commons education committee, said: ‘While the vast majority of tutors do a remarkable job in trying to educate young people, the problem is that even having one case of abuse is one too many. It is, to me, unthinkable and unacceptable that any individual in the legal system for abuse is able to carry on tutoring. If that doesn’t show where the system needs repairing, what does?’
The Daily Mail has found 36 cases of private tutors who have been con
‘Unthinkable and unacceptable’
of sex offences since 2010. The scale of the problem however is likely to be far worse as, due to the nature of the industry being unregulated, there is no centralised data held.
The offences range from an online tutor in Oxford caught exposing himself to a child in 2018 to a maths tutor from London jailed for sexually assaulting three pupils last year.
Worryingly, the list includes tutors who would not have passed background checks had they been required due to their offending history.
In one shocking example, a convicted paedophile resumed working as a private tutor after finishing a rehabilitation programme for sex offenders. Robert Mitchell was then jailed again a decade later in 2012 after he was found with almost a quarter of a million indecent images of children on his computers.
Among the hundreds of disks were pictures he had taken of a 17-year-old pupil, Bolton Crown Court heard. Sentencing him to four years in prison, Judge Timothy Clayson expressed concern that Mitchell had been able to continue working as a private tutor despite his 2002 conviction.
The list also includes 63-year-old Yi Liu who admitted he was still giving private tuition to a schoolgirl despite last month pleading guilty to sexually abusing former pupils.
He is due to be sentenced today for abusing four boys under the age of 13 between 2012 and 2018.
In Yorkshire, meanwhile, a history tutor branded a ‘predatory paedophile’ in court had continued teaching youngsters for three years while on bail. Former council chairman Heathcliffe Bowen, 53, was seen as a pillar of the community and taught GCSE and A-level pupils privately for a decade.
But in 2018 he was convicted of paying an underage boy for sex and taking part in sexually explicit online chats with youngsters.
The private tuition industry has boomed in the past decade and is now worth about £2billion a year. More than a quarter of secondary school pupils have at some point made use of a private tutor, according to educational charity The Sutton Trust.
Yet it remains unregulated despite
‘Indecent images on his computer’
more than 100,000 tutors estimated to be working full or part- time, according to The Tutors’ Association. Around half are thought to be private individuals who often rely on word-ofmouth recommendations.
Tutors are not currently required to have an Enhanced DBS Check, which flags if they have a criminal record or are banned from working with children.
Some tutoring companies recommend those signing up to pay £23 to have a Basic DBS Check, which anyone can take, to make their profile ‘more appealing’ to parents. A spokesvicted
man for the Disclosure and Barring Service – a governmental body helping employers make safer recruitment decisions – however said such checks are limited as they only reveal if convictions are ‘unspent’. They do not check if the applicant is on the Sex Offenders Register or if they are on the national Children’s
Barred List, which bans them from working with any under-18s.
Several of Britain’s biggest tutoring websites have backed calls for a regulatory body and already ensure all their employees have an Enhanced DBS check.
The Tutors’ Association, the only membership body for the profession, has called on the Government to recognise its register of certified individual tutors and companies. Costing £99-per-year, members are signed up to the body’s safeguarding policy, code of practice, and have an Enhanced DBS check.
Founder Chris Lenton said: ‘We need a statutory instrument to say you have to be on the register. Any tutor worth their salt would then want the status of being recognised as a member. It’s a very strong marketing tool surely.’
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, said: ‘It is very concerning that some who already have convictions for abusing children can evade detection because they are not required to provide a DBS check. The Government should look at this loophole and see how it can be closed.’