Maureen Devine
Introduction
Maureen Devine, the head of school and designated safeguarding lead at All Saints Bedworth C of E Primary School and Nursery in Warwickshire, was banned from teaching for three years’ minimum in September 2021 after a Teaching Regulation Agency panel found she had failed to pass on a foster child’s disclosures of abuse — including that his foster carer had grabbed him around the throat — and had instead contacted the carers directly through the school’s parent messaging app. A review of the boy’s safeguarding file after she left found a pattern of unreported concerns, and a Local Authority Designated Officer concluded the missed referrals had likely left the child exposed to significant harm for longer than necessary. Devine denied the allegations, did not attend her hearing, and was found against on every particular.
Background Information
Devine joined All Saints Bedworth — a Church of England primary school and nursery in the Warwickshire town of Bedworth — as head of school and designated safeguarding lead on a fixed-term contract starting 15 January 2019, which expired on 31 August 2019. As designated safeguarding lead she was the recipient of the school’s “green forms”, the written record staff completed for every disclosure or safeguarding concern before handing them to the DSL for action. When her contract ended, a new head of school and DSL took over in September 2019, reviewed the boy’s safeguarding file, and found previous similar disclosures and staff concerns that had been reported to Devine but apparently never passed to the pupil’s social worker.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
A designated safeguarding lead who sat on a foster child’s abuse disclosures and messaged his alleged abusers directly — banned after the file was re-opened behind her.
The pupil, anonymised as Pupil A, was a looked-after child living with foster carers. On or around 28 January 2019 he disclosed that his foster carer had grabbed him around the throat, leaving a red mark; on or around 22 March 2019 he disclosed that his foster parents frequently told him to “rot in hell”. The panel found Devine was aware of the January disclosure — the green form was located with all the school’s others and would have been in her possession — and that even if she had never seen it, she had at least been told verbally and was obliged to act. On the March disclosure, evidence showed she used ClassDojo, the school’s family messaging platform, to contact Pupil A’s carers about what he had said. The panel called that direct contact “wholly inappropriate” regardless of the method, noting it could have increased the risk to a looked-after child. The new head of school’s September 2019 referral set off a Position of Trust process: the LADO concluded the boy had likely been exposed to potential significant harm over a longer period because the concerns were never adequately followed up, and the foster carers’ employment was ultimately terminated through a panel process in January 2020. The LADO told the school to refer Devine to the Teaching Regulation Agency and the DBS.
Devine denied the facts through solicitors in July 2020 and made no admissions of misconduct. She did not attend the virtual hearing and was not represented; the panel proceeded in her absence under the R v Jones principles, satisfied her absence was voluntary. It found both limbs of the safeguarding failure proved, and found her failures represented missed opportunities to protect the boy from further harm, crediting the evidence of the successor head who reviewed the file and the subsequent multi-agency meetings.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The consequence that mattered happened inside the system: a substantiated Position of Trust finding against the foster carers, their removal from their role, and referrals of both the school’s failures and the teacher herself to the regulator. The decision records no public statement from Devine, no union campaign and no media coverage — a head of school who was, in effect, the school’s safeguarding guarantee had become its single point of failure, and the record is almost entirely administrative. Her defence was silence: no evidence was offered at the hearing, no witnesses were called on her behalf, and the panel’s findings rest on her successor’s testimony, the green-form record and the multi-agency file review.
Current Status
Ms Devine 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, made by decision maker Sarah Buxcey on 29 September 2021, carries a three-year review period: she may apply for it to be set aside from October 2024 at the earliest, and a panel would then decide whether the prohibition should stand. The decision maker noted the panel had found she “failed to provide any evidence to demonstrate insight or reflection on her actions or the actual / potential harm that could have been caused to Pupil A”, and weighed that lack of insight heavily.
Impact on Their Career/Life
The case is the site’s clearest safeguarding-leadership failure: the person paid to escalate child-protection concerns was the bottleneck that stopped them. It sits beside the site’s other DSL cases as an example that the designation itself is what a prohibition panel weighs — a head of school is treated as more culpable, not less, for a missed referral. The ClassDojo detail gives it a modern edge: the panel had no difficulty treating a parent-communication app as a wholly improper channel for an active abuse disclosure, and its reasoning — that contacting alleged abusers directly can raise the risk to a looked-after child — is the template for how messaging-platform safeguarding failures are now argued.