Stephen Adcock
Introduction
Stephen Adcock is a former head of faculty at Okehampton Community College in Devon who was prohibited from teaching indefinitely after admitting he spent much of 2018 viewing pornography on school equipment — including searches for “virgin fuck”, “Sluts” and “Teen Porn”, and visits to adult dating and couple-swapping sites — while holding the school’s electronic-safety portfolio. He was summarily dismissed in March 2019, lost his appeal, and was banned from teaching on 6 October 2022 by decision maker Sarah Buxcey with a two-year review period. The police took no further action in 2020; the regulator’s ban rests on his own admitted conduct.
Background Information
Adcock had worked at the College since 1 September 2001 — more than two decades — and led its computer science, ICT and Business Studies faculty, a seniority that gave him lighter content restrictions on school systems than ordinary staff. Between April and October 2018 he used that access to view pornographic videos and material on school equipment, including searches using the terms “virgin fuck”, “Sluts” and “Teen Porn”, adult dating websites, couple-swapping sites, and material of sexual indecency including live-streaming sex websites. The College’s trial monitoring software flagged the activity and reported it internally on 8 October 2018; an investigation followed, and Adcock admitted the conduct, saying it happened when he was working alone in a closed office and not in the classroom environment. He admitted the facts and that the behaviour was of a sexual nature and sexually motivated.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Admitted: pornography on school equipment, in school hours, by the teacher responsible for e-safety. The panel found his behaviour was sexually motivated and a significant breach of the Teachers’ Standards and a safeguarding risk — his office sat on a busy science corridor with a window in the door giving clear sight of his workstation.
The panel accepted the viewing happened in a closed office rather than in front of pupils, but found the risk was built into the setting: pupils could have seen the material through the door’s window, and the screen he used was the same one he worked on. He had signed and agreed to the College’s acceptable-use policies, and as the person responsible for pupils’ electronic safety he “took advantage of the lighter restrictions on his usage”. The employment consequences were immediate: a disciplinary hearing on 13 March 2019 ended in summary dismissal, his appeal was dismissed on 2 April 2019, and the police decided to take no further action on 23 June 2020. The panel found the volume of images and searches evidenced a deep-seated attitude that leads to harmful behaviour, and that he abused his position of trust by using the greater access his role gave him. His conduct was found to be of a sexual nature and sexually motivated.
Public Reaction and Consequences
Adcock’s path through the system was marked by evasion that the panel weighed against him: he made “various denials” during the College’s investigation and to the TRA before making a full and frank admission in a signed statement of agreed facts on 16 June 2022. The panel found his evasiveness in accepting culpability gave rise to reservations about his future regard for safeguarding responsibilities, and noted that his regret and shame centred on his tarnished record and the impact on himself and his family — he had not, to date, recognized the impact his actions had on the College. The panel nevertheless found the conduct was not serious sexual misconduct: no harm to any person was evidenced, and there could have been no criticism had he accessed the material outside school hours on a personal computer. That distinction, plus his late admissions and expressed shame, produced a two-year review recommendation rather than a no-review order.
Current Status
Adcock is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England. Buxcey agreed with the panel that a two-year review period reflected the seriousness of the findings while giving him the opportunity to develop and demonstrate insight: he may apply for the order to be set aside from 13 October 2024, two years from the order. The decision makes clear that an application is not an automatic right — a future panel would weigh whether his insight is now real. The ban closed a teaching career of more than twenty years, all of it at the same Devon college, and followed his 2019 dismissal by more than three years.
Impact on Their Career/Life
The case turns on the collision between a senior role and the conduct: the panel’s harshest finding was not the viewing itself but the mismatch — the faculty head responsible for keeping pupils safe online using the elevated system access his job gave him to consume the same material he was employed to filter out. It is also a clean example of the regulator’s calibration between workplace pornography cases: the two-year review, versus the no-review orders given to teachers whose conduct involved children directly, turns expressly on the absence of child-focused harm and the lawfulness of the same conduct at home. For schools, the decision documents how trial monitoring software — installed for exactly this purpose — converts months of private desk behaviour into dated, screenshot-backed findings.