David Crawford

Introduction

David Crawford is a former primary school teacher at Fishburn Primary School in Stockton-on-Tees who was banned from teaching for life in December 2024 after a Teaching Regulation Agency panel accepted his conviction for assaulting a colleague — an incident in which he pinned her to her office chair with his arm across her chest and pressed a knife into her neck, telling her he was going to “slash” her and that she needed “slashing down a size”. Crawford, who taught at the school for more than sixteen years, was convicted of common assault in August 2021, dismissed after the criminal case concluded, and has been stripped of any right to apply to teach again.

Background Information

Crawford joined Fishburn Primary School on 3 May 2005 and remained until 18 November 2021, when his employment ended following the school’s disciplinary process. The colleague at the centre of the case, identified as Witness A, had joined the school in September 2019, shortly after an Ofsted rating of ‘Requires Improvement’. From early in her time there she described repeated hostility: Crawford was uncooperative and aggressive, refused to follow her instructions, called her fat, stole items from her desk, unscrewed the back of her chair so she fell when she sat, touched her clothes and sat on her lap.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Convicted of assault against a colleague after a knife incident on school premises with pupils present; banned with no route back to teaching.

The incident took place on the morning of 4 May 2020. Witness A was working at a computer with her back to the office door, with Witness D sitting opposite. At around 10:15am Crawford came in from behind her, pinned her to her chair with his arm around her chest, pushed her back and pressed a knife into her neck — she could feel the metal against her skin and could not move. As he pressed the knife to her neck he said he was going to “slash” her; when she told him to pack it in he laughed and said “the things I could do to you girl”, told her she needed “slashing down a size”, and when she said no one had ever spoken to her that way, replied that he had done “quite a bit of slashing down to size” in his time before leaving the room. The whole incident lasted about two minutes, after which Witness A burst into tears. Crawford returned an hour later and, rebuffed in his request to speak with her alone, tried to make a joke of it, saying he was just “clowning around”.

Witness A reported the incident to Durham County Council HR and the chair of governors the same day, and to the police on 3 June 2020; the school’s disciplinary investigation was paused while the criminal case ran. On 9 August 2021 Crawford was convicted of assault contrary to section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 at County Durham and Darlington Magistrates’ Court, fined £440, ordered to pay a £44 victim surcharge and £620 in prosecution costs. The panel heard witness evidence about the incident itself, and found the conviction proved on the memorandum of conviction. After the criminal case, the disciplinary process resumed, a hearing was held on 12 November 2021, and the LADO referred him to the TRA on 14 January 2022. Crawford took no part in the regulatory hearing, though in an email of 4 December 2024 he called the accusations against him “dishonest”.

Public Reaction and Consequences

The decision records no press or social-media coverage of the case. The panel viewed the conduct with gravity: it considered that members of the public would be “gravely concerned about an assault by a teacher against a colleague with a knife on school premises while there were pupils in School”. It acknowledged the conviction did not result in imprisonment, indicating the offence sat at the less serious end of the spectrum of violent offences in sentencing terms, but held that the abuse-of-trust and public-confidence factors outweighed that. The panel recommended a prohibition order with a seven-year review period — an unusually long review for a single conviction — reflecting the violence of the incident and the school setting.

Decision maker Marc Cavey went beyond the panel’s recommendation. Concluding that the seriousness of the conduct and the need to maintain public confidence required more, he decided that Crawford shall not be entitled to apply for restoration of his eligibility to teach, closing the seven-year review route the panel had contemplated.

Current Status

Crawford is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England. Despite the panel’s seven-year review recommendation, Cavey’s decision of 17 December 2024 removed any eligibility to apply for restoration, making the ban effectively permanent without further litigation. The determination is dated 13 December 2024. His right of appeal lies to the King’s Bench Division of the High Court within 28 days of notice of the order. The criminal conviction itself — a fine-based summary disposition — remains spent in ordinary terms, but the published regulatory findings now document the incident in detail, including the witness accounts of a two-minute knife assault and the earlier pattern of intimidating behaviour toward the same colleague.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The ban ends Crawford’s teaching career outright. At the time of the incident he had spent over fifteen years at a single primary school, and the case’s published record converts what the magistrates’ court treated as a fine-level common assault into a detailed finding of a knife threat against a colleague in a school office. The case is a notable data point in the TRA’s treatment of colleague-directed violence: the panel expressly weighed the fact that pupils were on site, and the decision maker concluded that a teacher who presses a knife to a colleague’s neck forfeits any realistic prospect of return, however long the review period. For the school, the findings vindicate the colleague’s contemporaneous reports of an escalating pattern that the internal fact-finding of May 2020 had only begun to uncover.

Sources

• source — “Teacher misconduct panel outcome: Mr David Crawford”, GOV.UK, Teaching Regulation Agency, published 13 December 2024.