A former PE teacher has been banned from the classroom after launching an online petition calling for his headteacher’s resignation over alleged racism.
Joshua Adusei, 31, encouraged students at Harris Academy Tottenham in north-east London to sign the petition in April 2021, a Teaching Regulation Agency panel heard. He had previously told the headteacher he would “get him out” if he did not resign.
Mr Adusei also committed “repeated safeguarding failures” over several months, including retweeting pupils’ comments supporting his position on social media.
The Change.org petition, which received more than 6,000 signatures, claimed the headteacher had permanently excluded three black students within a month of starting and introduced “a zero tolerance behaviour policy that disproportionately affects BAME and SEN students.”
Mr Adusei’s name was later removed from the petition after the Metropolitan Police received reports of four death threats from the school, according to The Guardian.
Giving oral evidence to the panel, the headteacher said Mr Adusei came to his office on April 19 2021 and informed him that he and others did not think he was doing a good job, and that he had come to request his resignation.
He said there was no attempt by Mr Adusei to specify his grievances or the basis upon which he was asking him to resign at the meeting, but that he said “If you don’t resign I am going to start a petition to get you out”, which left him feeling threatened.
Another witness told the panel that the following day, they saw Mr Adusei and another member of staff in the playground with around 10-20 students stood around them, which was “unusual” as he should not have been on duty for their lunch.
A Year 10 pupil who was stopped by the witness after walking past with their phone out – which was against school policy – said: “Not gonna lie sir, a member of staff has told me to get it out to sign a petition”.
Mr Adusei was suspended the same day.
Addressing the claims in the petition, the headteacher told the panel he had only been directly involved in excluding two students and that the decision was taken in consultation with various other management staff.
He said there was “no basis” for asserting that his actions disproportionately affected BAME or SEN students.
A separate Crowdfunder page which claimed Mr Adusei had suffered “a brutal exclusion and an attempted silencing and tarnishing of his reputation” due to the incident also raised £320.
The panel found Mr Adusei had made “deliberate and pre-determined decisions to publish untrue and/or misleading comments about Colleague A (the headteacher) and then to manipulate the actions of children for his own private purposes”, which it considered to be “an abuse of his position and an abuse of trust.”
It had received evidence that the headteacher suffered “threatening online abuse” as a direct of the petition, which had also led to plain clothes police officers being placed at the school gates.
The panel also heard that Scotland Yard had contacted the individual to implement enhanced protection measures as a result of the petition.
Further allegations that Mr Adusei had failed to complete welfare calls to 26 pupils in his tutor group and failed to teach online lessons on two occasions in January 2021 were also found to have been proven.
The panel was satisfied that Mr Adusei’s behaviour “amounted to misconduct of a serious nature which fell significantly short of the standards expected of the profession.”
Mr Adusei, who had been employed at the school since 2019, provided no mitigation to the panel or evidence of material insight or remorse for his actions.
In a written conclusion on Wednesday, decision maker Sarah Buxcey, acting on behalf of the Education Secretary, banned Mr Adusei from teaching indefinitely subject to a five-year review period.
She said: “In this case, factors mean that allowing a lesser review period is not sufficient to achieve the aim of maintaining public confidence in the profession.
“These elements are the seriousness of the findings involving safeguarding failures and the lack of evidence of either insight or remorse.”
