Wednesday 19 October 2022 12:01 AM Head of English at top private school loses job after suicide gaffe, employment ... trends now
A senior teacher at a top private school rocked by teenage suicides lost her job after telling a pupil in front of classmates ‘we were worried you were going to die’, a tribunal heard.
Katie O’Hara, head of English at £36,000-a-year Windermere School, ignored advice to avoid teaching texts featuring suicide — and even upset another pupil by instructing her class to rip a sensitive page out of a book mid-lesson.
This came just weeks after two 14 year old students took their own lives at the end of 2019 — leaving the school community concerned about a possible ‘cluster’ of suicides kicking off.
An employment tribunal found that Ms O’Hara, who joined the 159-year-old school in 2015 with more than 17 years’ experience as an English teacher at ‘well-regarded’ private schools, was not unfairly dismissed.
She gave written notice of her resignation in October, 2020, claiming she had left due to a bad working environment — although concerns had already been raised about her ‘erratic behaviour’.
In the term following the tragedies, Ms O’Hara, who became head of English in 2018, planned to teach Antigone.
This Ancient Greek tragedy by playwright Sophocles features several deaths by suicide as part of the story.
Windermere School, where Head of English Katie O’Hara lost her job at the £36,000-a-year school after telling a pupil 'we worried you were going to die' in front of classmates, is pictured
The tribunal heard she was instructed to choose ‘another book altogether’ by headteacher Ian Lavender, who told her: 'For obvious reasons, no texts studied for the rest of this academic year to any year group should mention suicide or death by hanging.'
Despite this, Ms O’Hara intended to go ahead and teach the text — and a pile of Antigone books were spotted ‘ready to go’ out to students, the panel was told.
During a lesson on 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, Ms O’Hara instructed her students to tear out a page which featured discussion of suicide — upsetting one female student so much she left the class.
Following the suicides, a warning system picking up on concerning internet material being accessed by students had been installed on the school’s computer, the hearing was told.
After an alert was triggered by one pupil’s search for Star Wars memes, Ms O’Hara entered the classroom he was located in, where he was being taught by Elizabeth Loughlin.
In the quiet of the room, she asked the boy if he was okay and said ‘we were worried you were going to die’ — words the other teacher and the students
