A teacher who secretly filmed unruly behaviour in the classroom for a television documentary has been found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct.
Angela Mason, of Aberdare Gardens, London, went undercover at several schools in the capital and the north east of England for the Channel 5 programme Classroom Chaos.
Using a camera hidden in her handbag, she recorded a number of incidents of pupils misbehaving and disrupting lessons she covered as a supply teacher in late 2004 and early 2005.
Mrs Mason admitted carrying out the secret filming, but denied it amounted to unacceptable professional conduct, arguing that she was acting in the public interest.
But at a hearing in Birmingham the General Teaching Council (GTC), the body which regulates the profession in England, ruled the public interest defence was not strong enough to justify the breach of trust implicit in the secret filming.
Issuing the judgment, Andrew Baxter - the chair of the GTC committee - said that secretly filming students would constitute unacceptable professional conduct in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
"We are not satisfied the public interest argument which Mrs Mason makes is sufficiently strong and exceptional to justify the secret filming of pupils which she undertook," he said.
"She was employed and paid by these schools to teach pupils in her care.
"In fact, her true motivation was to obtain secret film of the pupils for the purposes of a television programme. In that respect we find that her conduct abused the trust of the head teachers, staff and pupils at the schools."
Mr Baxter said the committee decided that Mrs Mason had not deliberately mismanaged the pupils in her care to exacerbate classroom disruption for the purposes of the documentary, but she had failed to use up-to-date techniques to control their behaviour.
