Perv teacher struck off for filming up girls’ skirts
BY KIRSTY STEWART A PRIMARY teacher who secretly filmed up girls’ skirts at the school he taught at has been struck off the teaching register.
James Hughes used his phone and iPad to record pupils after taking them out of class for one-to-one lessons.
The 54-year-old principal teacher at a school in North Lanarkshire would get girl pupils to stand on chairs and put their legs in the air while he recorded them under a desk.
Hughes, of Uddingston, Lanarkshire, made the children, aged between nine and 12, get changed in a cupboard where he “directed them to perform actions which exposed their underwear”.
Hughes’s actions only came to light when three teenagers who were on work experience at the school caught him filming.
In December last year, Hughes was sentenced to 18 months behind bars after pleading guilty to two charges of voyeurism.
The General Teaching Council for Scotland revealed he admitted the allegations “in full” and had agreed to be removed from the teaching register.
The body also revealed they had rejected a bid by Hughes to have his identity kept secret during proceedings. BY STEPHEN STEWART s.stewart@dailyrecord.co.uk A FEMALE veteran and cancer survivor has helped to remember “Scotland’s Vietnam”.
Former Royal Military Police soldier Suzanne Fernando led tributes to the fallen of the Korean War – a conflict dubbed the Forgotten War.
Military historian Trevor Royle also called it Scotland’s Vietnam – a brutal campaign involving 10,000 Scottish soldiers and sailors.
Suzanne and veterans from across the country gathered at one of Scotland’s biggest Korean War memorials to mark 65 years since the war’s end.
She said: “Many of those who fought in Korea were young men doing their National Service, most had little idea of where and what they were going into – others were in the regular Army.
“The memorial gives veterans and families of those who died a place of remembrance. When the soldiers finally got home, people seemed to know very little about what had happened in Korea. There was a feeling that it was all very far away.
“Some 65 years on from the armistice and the Korean conflict and its aftermath, we again paid our respects.”
Scotland lost 236 soldiers in the Korean War. The memorial site in Bathgate has an arboretum of 1114 native Scottish trees, one for every British serviceman who died, and a shrine surrounded by two mounds in the shape of the yin and yang on the Korean flag.
Mum of two Suzanne, 44, from Ardrossan, said: “It’s important that friends and relatives could come and have a place to think about things and repose and pay their respects to their dead relatives.
“All these men are lying now in Pusan in a South Korean military cemetery and it’s the only contact that their relatives have with them really. People attending the memorial have expressed that same feeling.
“They feel closer to their relatives reading their name off the name panels.”
As well as her military service, Suzanne beat cancer and is Scotland’s first Cancer Research UK Ambassador and a qualified cervical cancer support group leader. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of 28 while expecting Aaron, her second child.
She has her own awareness group and travels the country telling women about the importance of smear tests and helping women fight the disease.
Suzanne was nominated as the Record’s Community Hero at the Our Heroes awards in 2015.