Werner Nel was dismissed from his job as IT teacher after his superiors found a group of young girls in Year 2 had looked at ‘hardcore porn’
Young girls at a £10,000-a-year prep school saw ‘hardcore pornography’ after searching ‘the Queen’s underwear’ and ‘naked boys’ on their school computers during a lesson from a newly-qualified teacher, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.
Pictures of naked men and boys flashed up on the screens as the giggly six- and seven-year-olds at the all-girls prep school keyed in search words after IT teacher Werner Nel gave them the go-ahead to search whatever they wanted.
However, when Mr Nel realised what they were trying to do, he closed down the files and later tried to delete the search history before his bosses discovered what had been happening during his class.
The tribunal heard, however, that senior staff found out about the salacious web-sites after some girls told their parents they had seen ‘willies in mouths’ at school.
Yesterday the £10,000-a-year Brockhurst and Marlston House Preparatory School was being sued for public interest disclosure, unfair dismissal and breach of contract by Mr Nel, who was sacked after an internal investigation.
The panel, sitting in Reading, Berkshire, heard that the South African-born teacher was fired for trying to delete the computers’ Google history.
Mr Nel was dismissed from his job as IT teacher after his superiors found a group of young girls in Year 2 had looked at ‘hardcore porn’ after entering the words ‘naked boys’ and ‘the Queen’s underwear’ into the browser.
His superiors at the all-girls Marlston House said they had then been approached by upset parents who said their children had been ‘told off’ by the young man, who had recently been employed at the school after finishing his teacher training.
In their complaints, the parents claimed their little girls had arrived home saying they had seen images of ‘willies in mouths’, and one said they believed the IT teacher had tried to keep this a secret.
As a result of an official misconduct investigation following the incident, which took place on April 22 this year, HR manager Rachel Harper said Mr Nel was dismissed from his job at the school in Hermitage, near Newbury in Berkshire.
Miss Harper said Mr Nel, who lives in Hermitage, had told a co-worker about the incident while waiting in the lunch queue but downplayed its severity, saying the six and seven-year-olds had only found images of ‘people in their underwear.’
She said: ‘We went straight to the search history and saw that a search had been made for ‘naked boys’.
His superiors at the all-girls Marlston House (pictured) said they had then been approached by upset parents who said their children had been ‘told off’ by the young man
‘We clicked on it immediately and without doubt what was displayed on screen was multiple images of hardcore pornography involving men.
‘Unfortunately there were some of small boys mixed in with them.
‘My immediate thought was that I could not believe a teacher who saw these images did not instantly push a big red safeguarding button.
‘I was shocked at both the images and why someone very senior had not been immediately made aware of what the children had seen.’
The tribunal heard that Mr Nel had not known that these search queries had been discovered by his superiors and printed out on that same evening.
Miss Harper said that when he brought his version of the documents to her the next morning, she noticed the two searches, from Terminal 13 and Terminal 17, had gone missing.
She said: ‘I will never forget looking at the search history for Terminal 13 and not seeing ‘naked boys’. I felt an overwhelming sense of embarrassment for Werner and I was thinking: ‘My gosh, what have you done?’
As a result of an official misconduct investigation following the incident, which took place on April 22 this year, HR manager Rachel Harper (pictured) said Mr Nel was dismissed from his job at the school in Hermitage, near Newbury in Berkshire
Miss Harper told the tribunal she called the girls’ parents in for a meeting shortly after the incident took place, where she was told the children had seen ‘willies in mouths’ after being asked by the teacher to search whatever they wanted in the web browser.
She said: ‘The girls had told their parents that they thought they had been told off.
‘One of the complaints read: ‘Most of the class were looking at totally inappropriate content. It raises the question as to how much content was viewed by so many apparently unnoticed by Mr Nel’.’
However, Miss Harper added that her co-worker, Julie Middleton-Reid, who was present during the lesson, had described her account a few days later.
She said: ‘In an email she stated her understanding that one girl had encouraged another to type ‘naked’ and that Werner had seen this and immediately had shut the images down.
‘Julie said the girls had seen people in their pants and were all quite giggly. Julie had told them they were naughty.’
Laying out Mr Nel’s version of events, she said he claimed to have asked the children to search within certain parameters and suggested to type in the names of three animals.
He had also claimed to her that he had not realised at the time the severity of the content they had accessed, as he left the classroom in a rush.
Miss Harper said that headmaster David Fleming had taken Mr Nel into the IT room and showed him the images, saying: ‘Are you seriously telling me that you did not see what was in front of you before you closed the browser window?’
‘You moved the mouse to shut down the page and in that time you did not see what was on the screen?’
The £10,000-a-year Brockhurst and Marlston House Preparatory School is being sued for public interest disclosure, unfair dismissal and breach of contract by Mr Nel, who was sacked after an internal investigation
She said Mr Nel had insisted this was the case, replying: ‘No, I just saw nakedness.’
The school, located deep in the West Berkshire countryside, currently teaches 290 students aged three to 13.
The sexes are divided into the all-boys Brockhurst School and the all-girls Marlston House.
Fees for day students range from £328 to £5,490 per term, with boarding options for over-9s amounting to a total of £7,373 to £7,957 per term, according to the Independent Schools Council.
IT consultant Chris Jones, at Infratek Limited, who was hired by the school to prevent the breach from happening again, said the search history had been changed by deleting the queries and manually changing the computer’s clock to enter a new query with the same time stamp.
At Brockhurst and Marlston, he said the culprit had searched ‘naked boys’ at 11:50 on Friday morning, then gone back into the system at some point in the near future and replaced it with ‘dogs’.
He said: ‘The school is located deep in the West Berkshire countryside and it has very poor line speed. As a result, the school has four support lines coming into it for data.
‘This causes difficulties in respect of installing a filter appliance to prevent websites containing, for example, pornography.’
Following his formal dismissal from the prep school, Mr Nel had again contacted the school to raise a formal grievance, saying that during the investigation there had been ‘a complete lack of HR support, causing him considerable stress.’
In a letter read out at the tribunal, he said the school had made him a ‘scapegoat’ by assuming at the first instance that he had been responsible for changing the browser history.
The school’s headmaster, David Fleming (pictured), said he had first believed the children were exaggerating the severity of the images but admitted at the tribunal that he had ‘the wrong end of the stick’
Miss Harper insisted this decision had not been made lightly but said she believed the version of events would have been the only possible option.
During cross-examination it was revealed that experts from Answers Investigation, a firm hired by the school to determine how the searches were deleted, revealed that the search words would have been changed before Mr Nel logged onto the system at 9.35am on a Monday morning.
Addressing the evidence, Judge Andrew Gumbiti-Zimuto asked Miss Harper: ‘What is it about the case against him that survives after reading the experts’ evidence? The last person to access the system before then was you. Did you change the search history?’
In response, she said: ‘No, I would never have done that.’
The school’s headmaster, David Fleming, said he had first believed the children were exaggerating the severity of the images but admitted at the tribunal that he had ‘the wrong end of the stick.’
He said: ‘I remember saying to Miss Harper that Mr Nel was a good member of staff and that I would not have his name dragged through the mud.
‘I was also under the impression that the two girls whose mothers had complained could not have seen any images because they were not near the tainted computer.
‘I realised I had a problem with Mr Nel because he appeared to have so mishandled the situation. It now seemed that the girls were telling the truth and I had got entirely the wrong end of the stick.
‘It was clear to me that in the time it took to see the screen, recognise that there were naked images and to close the screen would have been a few seconds, which was easily long enough to recognise that the images were pornographic and not just random nakedness.
‘He gave every impression from his manner and his extraordinary story that he was lying to me. Further I could think of no other reasonable explanation other than that he had seen the images, had under-reported what happened and had falsified the search history. I still believe that.
‘If Mr Nel had told me the truth at that point we could have dealt with it as a moment of madness and we could have moved on but because I believed at that point, and still do, that he was lying to me. I felt pushed into having to take it further with formal proceedings.’
Regarding the grievance complaints Mr Nel raised after he was dismissed from his job, Mr Fleming said: ‘Mr Nel’s grievances were seeking to muddy the waters and were nothing more than an attempt to draw attention to peripheral issues and away from the main quesiton of his conduct.’
In a letter read out at the tribunal, Mr Nel said the school had made him a ‘scapegoat’ by assuming at the first instance that he had been responsible for changing the browser history
Mark Templeman, who is head of the school’s IT department and a close friend of Mr Nel, said that the teacher had approached him and mentioned the incident in the dining hall but understated its severity.
He said: ‘Werner and I were very good friends. We had been friends for years and I invited him to my wedding.
‘If he said that there were no sexual scenes or any penetration I believed he was telling the truth. He presented it as a filtering issue.
‘Mr Nel started the conversation with: ‘Mark, I think our filtering system isn’t working because…’ and then went on to talk about the girls seeing inappropriate images and led me to believe that the images were of people in underwear.
‘I thought they had seen cartoon images of people in pants, the Queen and ladies in lingerie, large bras and pants like an Anne Summers catalogue. There was nothing about children seeing material that would have disturbed them.’
When asked if Mr Nel knew his way around a computer, he said: ‘He ran a gaming club in the evenings with the boarders. Mostly computer games.
‘He would always be boasting about having the new iPhone first.’
The tribunal continues.