Rosemin Najmudin

Introduction

Dr Rosemin Najmudin taught Health and Social Care at Harris Academy South Norwood in London from 1 April 2017 until she ceased working there on 31 August 2018. In June 2022 a Teaching Regulation Agency professional conduct panel found proved a cluster of allegations from July 2018: sending one student’s coursework to another student, forwarding student work to her own personal email account, knowingly marking an absent student as present at registration, and a pattern of inappropriate email contact with students and former students that included over-familiar nicknames, kisses denoted by “X"s, invitations to her home and disparaging remarks about her colleagues. The panel also had before it her 2012 conviction for doing an act tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice, for which she received nine months’ imprisonment. Najmudin did not attend the hearing and was not represented, and decision maker John Knowles banned her from teaching for four years before she may apply to have the order set aside.

Background Information

Najmudin joined the Academy as a teacher of Health and Social Care on 1 April 2017 and was also a form tutor. The conduct that ended her career surfaced on 20 July 2018, when the Academy learned she had emailed pupils encouraging them to complain about the school via their parents. Staff then accessed her school email account through the Harris Federation’s formal process and found further messages: emails to students’ personal addresses, an email attaching one student’s work to send to another, and emails from her school account to her own personal account carrying student work. She left the Academy on 31 August 2018. In October 2018 the school completed a JCQ suspected malpractice form to the OCR exam board, which interviewed her and referred her case to a Malpractice Committee meeting on 11 July 2019. Years earlier, on 17 October 2012, she had been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of doing an act tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice, sentenced on 27 February 2013 to nine months’ imprisonment.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Exam dishonesty, a false register mark and over-familiar emails to students; a prior conviction for perverting the course of justice; banned with a four-year review bar. Najmudin denied the conduct in her exam-board interview but sent no representative to the regulatory hearing, and the panel found every allegation proved on the documents.

The panel found that Najmudin emailed a copy of Student A’s coursework to Student B, who had asked her form tutor what to do over the summer after switching courses — Student B recalled being promised “help” that arrived as another pupil’s live work. It rejected her claim that someone at the Academy had sent the emails maliciously from her account, noting that the access process required HR permission and that her account implied she knew the sending was improper. It also found she had sent student work to her personal email three times on 20 July 2018, taking it outside the school IT system, and that her conduct lacked integrity and was dishonest. The panel found she had marked Student H present at morning registration on 16 July 2018 after Student H emailed at 7.43am asking exactly that — she replied “OMG, wonderful, girl or boy and of course. So happy for you x” and marked them present — false information about a child’s whereabouts that the panel called a serious safeguarding issue. A further allegation that an OCR malpractice finding had barred her from exams for three years was discontinued at the TRA’s own application for lack of evidence, and the panel expressly declined to rely on the exam board’s findings.

Public Reaction and Consequences

The email-contact findings covered every letter of allegation 4: addressing students as “babes”, “darl”, “hun” and “darling”; inviting former pupils to come to her home; telling a student to ignore a colleague as “a stupid woman” and to get her parents to complain, while telling another that she was “so cross with my idiotic department”; encouraging complaints via parents while asking students to take her name off the complaint email; calling a student “as cute as her aunty”; signing off with “X"s to seven students; and giving a student her personal email address and mobile number under an email subject line reading “Keep private”. The panel found no evidence of sexual motivation but treated the sexualised language as dangerous in itself, concerned it “may teach the students that this was an appropriate way for a teacher to engage with a student and may therefore place them at a higher risk of exploitation in the future”. Weighing against her were repeated dishonesty, the absence of any insight or remorse, the finding of a relevant offence, and conduct the panel found calculated and motivated; there was no mitigation before it.

Current Status

Najmudin is prohibited from teaching indefinitely. The panel recommended a four-year review period — expressly because her age made a longer bar likely to remove any meaningful prospect of return — and Knowles adopted that recommendation on 1 July 2022, having found that a two-year period would not suffice given the dishonesty, the lack of insight or remorse, and the relevant-offence finding. She may apply for the order to be set aside, but not before 6 July 2026, and such an application is not an automatic right; without a successful application she remains prohibited for life. The order took effect on service, with a right of appeal to the High Court within 28 days. Her 2012 conviction and nine-month sentence stand as separate criminal history. The determination is dated 28 June 2022.

Impact on Their Career/Life

The case shows how a teacher’s own paper trail can carry an entire regulatory case without a hearing defence: every finding rested on emails the Academy recovered through its IT-access process, including messages Najmudin had marked “Keep private”. It also illustrates the limits of the regulator’s dependence on exam-board machinery — the OCR malpractice bar, the allegation that made the case look like a straightforward cheating scandal, was dropped before findings began, and the life-changing outcome rested instead on the school-level facts. The safeguarding frame the panel applied to a false register mark, treating an absent child’s whereabouts as a potential missing-person delay, has become a recurring theme in registration-mark cases. For Najmudin, a prior 2012 conviction resurfaced six years later as an aggravating relevant offence, converting a boundary-and-dishonesty case into one where the panel found both fraud and serious dishonesty.

Sources

• Dept for Education, “Teacher misconduct panel outcome: Dr Rosemin Najmudin” — source