Top school PA put £150,000 fees into her own account
A HEADMASTER’S personal assistant plundered more than £150,000 from an exclusive preparatory school by pressuring parents to pay fees directly into her bank account.
Valerie Barber, 56, also wired herself cash which she ‘borrowed’ from the £ 18,500- a- year girls’ school over four years.
The missing money was discovered only during an audit at Pembridge Hall School in Notting Hill, west London, which educates the children of models, designers and TV stars.
It is part of the Alpha Plus Group of independent schools and is the sister of neighbouring Wetherby School for boys, which was attended by Princes William and Harry.
Barber, from Ealing, west London, sobbed in the dock at Isleworth Crown Court yesterday as a judge told her she had avoided jail by a ‘whisker’ after her ‘repeated acts of dishonesty’ between 2010 and 2014.
Martin Lewis, prosecuting, said: ‘During the entire period records show she prevailed upon parents to pay monies into her own bank account rather than the school bank account.
‘Money transferred from parents to her private account was essentially on a fairly regular basis – on average £1,000 to £2,000 a time ...
‘She was charged and put forward no explanation why she had taken the money, and there are no details as to what she spent it on.
‘It would appear she said to the probation officer there were bills and expenses to pay ...
‘There does appear to have been some contrivance to avoid detection by pressuring parents to pay money into that account.
‘ It circumvented the school’s involvement and made it more difficult for the school to detect.
‘She has also transferred money from the school’s bank account to her own. She certainly had funds in her account at the time ... she was also receiving a salary.’
Amiot Vollenweider, for Barber, said: ‘She was struggling both with her own depression and the fact that her husband was unable to work and subsequently the financial burden was on her. She had a son serving in Afghanistan whose life she feared for and had a mother at the time suffering from Alzheimer’s who died in 2013. She turned, it would seem, to drinking excessively and what started out originally as a thought to simply borrow the money and pay it back, spiralled dramatically out of her control.’
He argued her fraud had ‘ little prospect of success’ despite going on undiscovered for so long.
‘It was a matter of luck rather than anything else that it was able to continue for four years, but frankly it was not sophisticated in the slightest,’ he said.
Barber remains £30,000 in debt and is expected to be sacked from the school. She has paid back £26,104, including £ 5,000 to parents, the court heard.
Sentencing, Judge Robin Johnson told her: ‘Employers should be able to trust employees to act in an honest way, not for selfish gain.
‘It took a long time for your crime to be discovered, and I accept that no blame was cast on anybody else ...
‘I consider I can avoid sending you to prison immediately by a whisker, but you come about as near to going to prison as you can.’
At a previous hearing, Barber admitted one count of fraud by false representation. Judge Johnson handed her a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years, ordered her to complete 250 hours of unpaid work and to adhere to a threemonth curfew.
‘Not sophisticated in the slightest’