Will the ISA Bar Sam Handley?

Newsflash: a PE teacher had a life before he was a teacher, and did some nude modelling. Now because those photos have surfaced on a porn site, he faces the sack:

A teacher at an all-boys grammar school has been suspended after naked pictures of him surfaced on a gay porn website.

Internet links to images of Sam Handley, 25, were spread around Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone, Kent.

Using the pseudonym ‘Mike’, the PE teacher posed naked in one picture sprawled on a bed with his legs apart, and in another he is captured resting against some furniture.

Does it appear he did this shoot whilst a teacher? No. In fact someone in the HateMail’s comments claims to be a former student who knows that for sure, and stands by him as a good teacher. Why was he suspended? Why is he at risk of dismissal? The same person rightly points out that they weren’t even accidentally accessed by pupils – someone had to trawl whichever porn site was hosting them at the time and then choose to circulate them. Should Handley be held responsible for that? The Sun reports:

He was hauled in by the deputy head and sent home.

Last night he was facing the sack – as pupils at prestigious Harvey Grammar School, in Folkestone, Kent, told how a gleeful classmate stumbled on the pictures.

A ‘gleeful classmate’ eh? In that case I hope that this pupil will be held entirely responsible for malicious behaviour against a man who is allowed to have a life in the internet age (and who has harmed noone), and duly be expelled. It’s absurd that Handley might lose his job, and might be barred anyway by the Independent Safeguarding Authority from working with children (because they’re allowed to make barring decisions based on material such as this) – take a look at the photos on the Sun hyperlink to see just how harmless they are. Then ask yourself what sort of people we will end up with as teachers (not to mention how few of them) if we continue down the path of expecting them to have had flawless lives before their careers started. Sam Handley’s photos may be embarrassing, but they’re not harmful, and his continued employment should only be determined by his merits as a teacher.

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