UNITED KINGDOM
Daily Mail
By Sandra Parsons
All children have a right to expect the adults around them to behave responsibly, especially those whose job it is to teach them.
And Jeremy Forrest, the 30-year-old married maths teacher who has run away to France with 15-year-old Megan Stammers, has not so much broken what should be an inviolable bond of trust as smashed it to smithereens.
In February – that’s an incredible seven months ago — a fellow pupil reported Mr Forrest to another teacher after seeing him and Megan holding hands on the plane back from a school trip to Los Angeles. The school, Bishop Bell C of E in Eastbourne, admits it has been ‘investigating concerns’ — and, according to some reports, Mr Forrest was due to be suspended the day after he disappeared with his pupil.
Whatever the truth, the fact that he was not only allowed to continue teaching Megan but was also giving her extra maths tuition after school, so long after the alarm was first raised, almost beggars belief.
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