Brendon Fallows

Introduction

Brendon Fallows is a former class teacher and maths lead at Lady Bay Primary School in Nottingham who was banned from teaching after a panel found he used a colleague’s mobile phone without her consent, guessed her passcode, and tried to send an intimate video from her phone to his own via WhatsApp. The October 2023 incident ended his ten-year career at the school: he was dismissed that December, and in December 2024 the Teaching Regulation Agency panel found his conduct dishonest, sexually motivated conduct within the Advice’s meaning, and grounds for prohibition. The decision maker, David Oatley, imposed an indefinite ban on 23 December 2024 — Fallows having admitted the conduct in a signed statement of agreed facts.

Background Information

Fallows, born May 1987, joined Lady Bay Primary School in September 2013 as a class teacher and became maths lead, holding what the panel called a position of authority and responsibility on the senior leadership team. On 5 October 2023, while a colleague — Staff Member A — taught his class during her planning time, her phone sat in her coat pocket in the locked staff office. At 3:16pm a WhatsApp message failed to send from her phone to an unsaved number. When she checked at 5:15pm she found the failed message and its thumbnail, took screenshots, and on 6 October reported it; Fallows was sent home, the Local Authority Designated Officer was contacted, and he was suspended on 12 October. He was dismissed on 12 December 2023, and the school referred him to the TRA two days later. The case was decided at a private meeting on 18 December 2024 without a hearing, on his admissions.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Admitted and proved. The panel found proved that on or around 5 October 2023 Fallows accessed Staff Member A’s personal mobile phone without her consent and attempted to send a personal video from her phone to his own via WhatsApp, and that this conduct lacked integrity and was dishonest.

Fallows did not dispute the mechanics — he explained them himself. In his investigation interview he said the phone hung in her coat pocket, that he did “not rummage or search”, that he guessed her password using her Instagram username and her date of birth, getting in “the first or second time”, and that he browsed her photos and videos before trying to send a video thumbnail to himself. Staff Member A’s account corroborated the discovery: she never watched the video, saw “skin” in the thumbnail, deleted it immediately, and noticed the sender’s profile picture looked like Fallows — “quite an old picture”. On dishonesty, applying Ivey v Genting Casinos, the panel found he knew what he was doing was dishonest — no consent had been given — and that as a decade-serving senior leader he plainly knew it. It found the act would be considered dishonest by the standards of ordinary, decent people, both subjectively and objectively. The panel treated the behaviour as engaging the Advice’s sexual-misconduct factor and found his actions intentional, “calculated and motivated” — the product of an attraction to the colleague he acknowledged.

Mitigation gave the case its tier. Fallows wrote that he “allowed curiosity to be overtaken by adrenaline and complete lack of judgement or awareness of impact and consequence”, and that he violated the victim’s trust and privacy, causing “a staggering amount of upset, anger and mistrust” and breaking the sense of safety in the workplace. Character references called him committed and liked by parents — but many were unsigned. The panel found his remorse and insight genuine but partial, the risk of repetition “to some extent limited”, and noted the public interest in retaining an experienced maths teacher — yet concluded dishonesty of this kind could not stay in the profession, recommending a two-year review period.

Public Reaction and Consequences

No press coverage attaches to the case; the regulator’s published decision is the public record. The concrete consequences were sequential and cumulative: suspension within a week of the incident, dismissal within ten, a TRA referral two days later, and a prohibition order a year after that. Oatley agreed with the panel that prohibition was proportionate notwithstanding the profession’s need for maths teachers, setting a two-year review period — the order cannot be set aside before 2 January 2027, and only if a fresh panel agrees. Fallows retains a right of appeal to the High Court within 28 days of notice; the published record shows none. No criminal prosecution appears in the decision — the school’s disciplinary process and the TRA’s were the entire accountability chain.

Current Status

Fallows is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England. The order, dated 23 December 2024 and effective from service, carries a review window opening on 2 January 2027 — two years from the order date. Setting it aside is not automatic: a new panel would weigh whether his insight and the passage of time have reduced the risk. His employment at Lady Bay ended in December 2023; the prohibition extends the consequence nationwide and across every regulated child-facing setting. The determination was issued almost exactly fifteen months after the October 2023 incident that ended a career begun in September 2013.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The case extends the teacher-misconduct catalogue into a novel fact pattern: not pupil contact, not images of children, but the digital violation of a colleague — and the regulator treated it as sexual misconduct and dishonesty combined. Its sharpest lesson is the password: Fallows’s ability to guess it from her Instagram made the intrusion possible, and the panel’s finding that he had “deliberately accessed” the phone by working out her date of birth defeated the curiosity defence he offered. The case also shows the modest weight character evidence carries when unsigned — the panel noted the testimonials’ format before discounting their conclusory praise. For schools, it is a template for the LADO referral sequence executed at speed; for teachers, it confirms that colleague-facing digital intrusions are career-ending professional matters, not private misjudgments.

Sources

• Dept for Education, “Teacher misconduct panel outcome: Mr Brendon Fallows” — source