Teacher who doctored pupils’ exam papers: 'It’s the biggest regret of my life'

Regret: Janine Clark
Dave Churchill24 December 2015

A teacher who escaped a ban after doctoring pupils’ exam papers said: “It’s the biggest regret of my life.”

Janine Clark, 43, tampered with the mental arithmetic scripts while alone in her headmaster husband’s office.

The teacher, at St John’s Angell Town Church of England school in Brixton, added decimal points or removed zeros on four of her pupils’ SATs papers. Examiners raised the alarm after questioning the number of changes the 11-year-olds made in the tests, which are used to rank schools in league tables. Mrs Clark — originally from South Africa — admitted altering scripts in May last year. There is no suggestion she colluded with her husband, Martin Clark.

Mrs Clark, who taught a 25-pupil class of 10 and 11-year-olds, was sacked from St John’s Angell Town, where she had taught since 2008, but is teaching at another primary school in Southwark.

This month, a National College for Teaching and Leadership misconduct hearing found she committed unacceptable professional conduct but did not ban her. It said her actions led to tests “being annulled” which impacted “negatively on pupils and the school”.

Today she said: “I was absolutely devastated thinking I would get banned, because teaching is my passion.

“It didn’t make any difference to the grades. I just saw the papers and thought, ‘How can you have answered like that?’ It wasn’t intentional, it was just a stupid moment of madness. It was only one mark each or something. My husband was headmaster at the time but he didn’t know about it because he was dealing with something else.

“It caused so much problems with us, but we’re still together. I’ve been through so much in the last year and a half ... I just want to put it behind me and forget about it. It’s the biggest regret of my life.” She added: “The pressures are so high to get the pupils performing.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT