I got teacher barred for abusing me but he’s still an MBE
WHEN teacher Jonathan Ullmer presented 16-year-old pupil Tom with a boardgame, the rules were described as innocent fun.
“He invited me to his house after school and showed me what looked like his own version of something like Game Of Chance,” Tom recalls.
“You rolled a dice and it had a ‘truth or dare’ element where you had to do forfeits like ‘run round the house with your trousers down’ or ‘give me a massage’.
“There were questions too – all of a sexual nature about my life. I would dread it.
“Every time I saw Ullmer out of school I knew this part of the evening was coming.”
The drama teacher at Cecil Jones High School, in Southend-on-sea, received an MBE for services to education in 2014.
And Tom went on to have a successful career as an actor and comedy script writer for shows such as Radio 4’s Electric Ink. But as an A-level student he was a victim of grooming and sexual abuse by Ullmer.
Now in a shocking memoir – Don’t Ask Me About My Dad – Tom Mitchelson, now 44, recounts growing up with an alcoholic, abusive, journalist father.
While spending periods living in refuges with his mother and triplet identical twin sisters to escape the violence, Tom went into his teenage years in a heightened state of vulnerability. It didn’t take long for his drama teacher to begin to take advantage.
“It started off as what seemed like a genuine interest,” Tom remembers.
“My home life was awful. I lived with a very violent father who abused and raped my mother. I was looking for stability and the things I wasn’t getting from my dad.
“Ullmer seemed to value me and at first I was happy to get his attention.”
Tom was taught by Ullmer from the age of 13 through to his A-levels.
The abuse was extensive: giving Tom
‘At first I wanted oldfashioned revenge’
alcohol, creating boardgames, asking Tom to touch him intimately, insisting on being given massages, encouraging Tom to “moon” him in games of “truth or dare”...
The abuse, which Tom did not reveal at the time, had, he now believes, a profound and traumatic effect on his personality as he entered adulthood.
He said: “I grew up in a house where everything my mum and I went through was a secret. Neither of us ever talked about the abuse we were experiencing – me from my drama teacher and my mum at the hands of my dad.
“The grooming Ullmer did from when I was 13 was incredibly manipulative.
“It was only when I had my own son that I began to think about how I would view a teacher giving him lifts home and asking him about his sex life.
“I also realised I’d inherited Ullmer’s techniques of lying and working in secrecy, and it made me quite a good undercover journalist for a time.”
As Tom’s mother finally divorced his father, who would go on to live in Portugal before dying at 72 in 2017, Tom reveals in his memoir of the moment he realised his abuse at the hands of Ullmer was something he needed to resolve.
“I’d never seen myself as a vulnerable person. It took until I was around 40 to see clearly what had happened to me and how awful it had been,” says Tom.
“What I wanted at first was old-fashioned revenge.
“He was still contacting me and really still believed we were friends. I wanted to punch him. But then I thought this was a solution that would only satisfy me.
“It took more thought before I decided the most important thing was to look out for other children. It seemed very unlikely I was the only child Ullmer had abused, so I decided to stop him in a less selfish way.”
By this point, Ullmer was teaching in a private school for western ex-pat students in Kazakhstan. Sending him an email, Tom asked if he would like to meet for a drink next time he was in London.
Ullmer readily agreed. And so, in an empty corner of the St Pancras Station bar in central London, Tom came face to face with his abuser for the first time in years.
He was ready to challenge the man who molested, manipulated and coerced him as a child. Not only that, but this time he was ready and prepared to get the evidence.
“It was very simple,” Tom reveals. “I pressed the record button on my phone and placed it face down as we talked.”
The conversation, later played to a tribunal, is a shocking testament to an abuser in denial of his actions and their effects.
At one point in the conversation (transcribed at length in the book), a flustered Ullmer, who had no idea his words were being recorded, stated to Tom: “I’m not saying there’s a parallel at all because I don’t think it is. But, you know, the head of Ofsted had a relationship with a sixth former and it was a different world. Perhaps you can take from it the fact that I’m finding this conversation difficult.”
In an incredible act of courage,tom now had evidence of his teacher reminiscing about abuse from two decades earlier.
“I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone else who has been abused,” reiterates Tom. “But for me it was absolutely the right thing to do. It was natural as I’d been an undercover journalist for a few years. It’s hard for police to get evidence in historic abuse cases. I felt it was only me who could trick him into meeting me as he had the opinion we were still friends.”
Tom decided to contact the school in Kazakhstan with his testimony and the recording. Ullmer was removed from his post and, in November 2019,Tom travelled to Coventry to participate as a witness in a professional conduct panel overseen by the Teaching Regulatory Agency.
“I didn’t have a problem being in the same room as him at the tribunal. I stared straight at him. He was averting his gaze and I felt the power shifting back to me. He couldn’t control me anymore. It was very freeing to confront him and finally I could rebalance things. It was hugely transformative to tell the unadulterated truth for the first time in my adult life.”
The panel ruled the teacher’s actions amounted to misconduct of a serious nature which fell significantly short of the standards expected of the profession.
Found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct which included a conclusion of “proven” that Ullmer had shared a bed with Tom and masturbated in front of him, Ullmer was banned indefinitely.
Yet at the time of writing, Ullmer, now 62, is still apparently working as a teaching consultant, according to his Linkedin profile. There has been no rescinding of his MBE. “I feel I’ve done my bit now,” says Tom. “Why he is still able to masquerade on the margins of the teaching profession to this day is a matter for other people now. The evidence is all there. It’s now time for other people to act.”
‘I felt the power shifting back to me’