Daniel Draghici

Introduction

Daniel Draghici is a former supply teacher deployed to the Queen’s School through the Enlighten Supply Pool agency who was prohibited from teaching indefinitely after a Teaching Regulation Agency panel found he grabbed a pupil by the hair, hit him around the face and head, kicked his upper leg and bottom, and shouted “what the fuck is wrong with you” at him during a physical education lesson — the pupil’s second day with the teacher, and the teacher’s second day at the school. Draghici could not be traced to give evidence; the panel decided the case on contemporaneous pupil statements written the day of the incident, and decision maker Alan Meyrick imposed the ban with a five-year review period on 6 March 2023.

Background Information

Draghici was deployed to the Queen’s School on 26 April 2018 for supply teaching work; the incident came the following day, 27 April 2018, during a PE lesson. The record the panel accepted describes a chaotic lesson: pupils made fun of his accent and misbehaved, groups ran out through the fire exit, and when Draghici went outside to bring them back they locked the door on him. When he got back inside, pupil witnesses said, he charged at Pupil A — the pupil he blamed for shutting the door — and the assault followed. Pupil A and five other pupils wrote handwritten statements that day; a fellow teacher described Pupil A as “petrified” and crying, and heard him shout, “help me… he’s coming to get me… he’s going to hit me”. Draghici himself wrote a statement, was escorted from the premises, and was never traced again: postal correspondence to his last known address was returned, and a presenting officer’s open-source searches could not link him to any UK residential address.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Absent, proved on contemporaneous evidence. Draghici sent one email in April 2020 and then never engaged despite six contact attempts over five years; the panel treated his absence as voluntary. It weighed handwritten statements taken from six pupils within hours of the incident above statements taken years later, and found all allegations proved. No criminal charge was pursued.

The proved assault, per the panel’s findings: he grabbed Pupil A’s hair, hit him around the face and head, kicked his upper leg and bottom with force Pupil A said he felt in his lower back, and shouted the profanity at him. The evidential spine was the six handwritten statements dated 27 April 2018 — Pupil B described him as having “shook his head very aggressively” before whacking and punching Pupil A; Pupil D described the hair-pull; Pupil F the repeated smacking and the kick to the back — which the panel called “compelling contemporaneous evidence”, reasoning that pupils could not have fabricated consistent accounts in the ten to fifteen minutes before writing, and that small differences in detail added credibility rather than undermining it. Pupil A, treated as a vulnerable witness and unable to attend, had his 2020 statement and his same-day handwritten account admitted as hearsay; the panel found he suffered a red ear and a sore back, corroborated by an email from the school recording the injuries as confirmed. Draghici’s own scrawled statement — “I slept and I crush over him” — was largely illegible; the panel noted LADO minutes recording that he admitted to the supply agency he had slapped a child, but found the evidence too thin to determine what his account was. A police case note from May 2018 recorded the decision not to prosecute: “This was certainly heavy handed but [Pupil A] has no visible injuries and it is not in his best interests to pursue this criminally”.

Public Reaction and Consequences

The panel was explicit that a troublesome class excused nothing: “It is utterly unacceptable for a teacher to grab, hit and kick a pupil”, it wrote, adding that as a professional he should have managed the behaviour and de-escalated rather than join it. It found his actions deliberate, his non-engagement with the regulator an aggravating feature in itself, and no evidence of insight or remorse anywhere in the file. The panel recommended a five-year review period to give him time to reflect and engage; the decision maker adopted it, and the prohibition with immediate effect followed.

Current Status

Draghici is prohibited from teaching indefinitely with effect from service of the 6 March 2023 order, and may apply to set the order aside no earlier than 10 March 2028 — five years from the order — with no guarantee that an application would succeed. The no-prosecution decision of May 2018 stands as the criminal disposition; the assault allegations were adjudicated only in the regulatory forum, on the civil standard. Until and unless a review panel rules otherwise, he is barred from teaching in any school, sixth-form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The case ends a career that, on the record, lasted two days in one school and produced a five-year regulatory silence broken only by a single 2020 email. Its regulator-facing lesson is evidential: contemporaneous pupil handwriting outweighed years-later witness statements, and a teacher who disappears does not avoid adjudication — notice by email to his last known address satisfied the procedures, and the case finished without him. Its classroom-facing lesson is the panel’s own sentence: poor behaviour is a management problem, and the teacher who answers it with fists joins the conduct file rather than the casualty list.

Sources

• Teaching Regulation Agency (GOV.UK), “Teacher misconduct panel outcome: Mr Daniel Draghici,” Mar 6, 2023 — source