Colin Wilkes
Introduction
Colin Wilkes spent twenty years at Hereford Cathedral School, the final sixteen as head of art, before admissions made in a 2019 investigation meeting unravelled into a criminal conviction and a lifetime teaching ban. He was convicted at Worcester Crown Court in July 2020 of five offences of sexual activity with a female aged between thirteen and seventeen while abusing his position of trust — conduct the agreed facts confirm was directed at a sixth-form pupil he taught — and sentenced to twenty months’ imprisonment. He admitted before a Teaching Regulation Agency panel that he had also begun a sexual relationship with a different pupil in the early 1990s, and that when a colleague caught him kissing the sixth-former in 2008 he ordered her to silence and lied to his headmaster that the kiss was a peck on the cheek. On 9 February 2022 decision maker Sarah Buxcey banned him from teaching for life, with no review and no restoration.
Background Information
Wilkes joined Hereford Cathedral School as a teacher in September 1998 and was appointed head of art in September 2002. On 24 January 2019 he was arrested and interviewed by police, and he resigned from the school on 13 February 2019. The convictions returned at Worcester Crown Court on 23 July 2020: five offences of sexual activity with a female aged thirteen to seventeen, abused through his position of trust, and he was sentenced to twenty months’ imprisonment on or around 4 September 2020. In the agreed facts he admitted that when Pupil A was in the sixth form he was her teacher, that they met up on nights out after two separate school functions, that the relationship was sexual, and that it included sexual activity during an overseas school trip. Colleagues who gave evidence described Pupil A as vulnerable, and the headteacher’s witness statement made the same point.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Convicted of five abuse-of-trust sexual activity offences against a sixth-form pupil; twenty months in prison; admitted an earlier pupil relationship in the 1990s and a 2008 cover-up; banned for life.
The 2008 incident anchored the dishonesty findings. A colleague, Pupil B, looked through a window before entering a room and saw Wilkes kissing Pupil A; Wilkes instructed Pupil B not to tell anyone, and at a meeting with the headmaster on 21 August 2009 he maintained that Pupil A had kissed him on the cheek. He admitted in the agreed facts that the kiss was passionate, not a peck, and that he was at that time engaged in a sexual relationship with Pupil A. The panel found both the instruction to secrecy and the false account proved, and classified them as dishonest conduct seeking to conceal a relationship that was itself criminal. The headteacher’s investigation notes from February 2019 recorded Wilkes being asked whether the school needed to worry about any other past pupils, and produced the second relationship: Pupil C, a sixth-form student in the early 1990s whom he described as a dear friend and admitted he had not taught, with whom he accepted he had engaged in sexual activity and intercourse while she was a pupil.
The panel noted a conflict in the evidence between Pupil A’s account and Wilkes’s as to how willing a participant she had been, and declined to resolve it — the conviction itself, it held, confirmed the breach of the position of trust, and the panel found he had taken advantage of Pupil A’s vulnerability from a position of power. Wilkes admitted every allegation through the agreed facts, and the panel weighed his expressions of remorse, but found the insight insufficient as to the impact on the pupils concerned. Buxcey’s decision made finality explicit: the combination of “sexual relationships with two pupils, 18 years apart, and his actions to cover up that behaviour” gave rise to a real risk of repetition, so no review period could be justified and no restoration would be permitted.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The case took four years to travel from arrest to ban — police interview in January 2019, resignation within three weeks, conviction in July 2020, sentence that September, and the regulatory decision in February 2022 — and the panel’s hearing considered teaching standards as they stood in the 1990s as well as 2008, finding that a sexual relationship with a pupil was no more acceptable in either era than at the time of the ban. The twenty-month sentence marked the courts’ view of the abuse-of-trust offences; the ban marked the regulator’s conclusion that remorse without insight could not make a repeat safe. No public statement from Wilkes or the school is recorded in the decision.
Current Status
Colin Wilkes is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England. The prohibition carries no review period, and in view of the seriousness of the findings he cannot apply for restoration of his eligibility to teach. His criminal sentence of twenty months’ imprisonment was served against the background of a career already ended by his February 2019 resignation. The published decision stands as the definitive public account of both relationships and the 2008 cover-up, under his name, on the government’s register.
Impact on Their Career/Life
The decision’s architecture is built from Wilkes’s own admissions: the agreed facts supplied the second relationship, the passionate kiss and the lie to the headmaster, so the contested trial record needed only to establish the five convictions. The panel’s refusal to resolve the willingness conflict, while still finding vulnerability and power imbalance, shows how abuse-of-trust convictions carry the moral weight even where details stay disputed. A twenty-year career at a cathedral school ended with a February 2019 walk to the door, and the ban ensures the art department he led for seventeen years is the last classroom record under his name.