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Answers Investigation in the Daily Telegraph reporting on an Employment Tribunal involving Computer Forensic Investigation
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A teacher at a £10,000 a year girls' prep school was sacked after he gave six and seven-year-olds free rein to search the internet only for them to look up pornography, an employment tribunal has heard
The young pupils searched for "the Queen's underwear" and "naked boys" on their school computers during a lesson from newly-qualified teacher Werner Nel
When Mr Nel realised what they were trying to do, he closed down the files and later allegedly tried to delete the search history before his bosses discovered what had been happening during his class
The tribunal heard however that senior staff found out about the web searches after some girls told their parents they had seen "willies in mouths" at school
On Tuesday the fee-paying Brockhurst and Marlston House Preparatory School near Newbury in Berkshire was being sued for public interest disclosure, unfair dismissal and breach of contract by Mr Nel who was sacked from his job as IT teacher after an internal investigation
HR manager Rachel Harper said Mr Nel, who lives in Hermitage, had told a co-worker about the incident while waiting in the lunch queue but downplayed its severity, saying the year 2 pupils had only found images of "people in their underwear."
She said: "We went straight to the search history and saw that a search had been made for 'naked boys'
"We clicked on it immediately and without doubt what was displayed on screen was multiple images of hardcore pornography involving men"
"Unfortunately there were some of small boys mixed in with them
"My immediate thought was that I could not believe a teacher who saw these images did not instantly push a big red safeguarding button
"I was shocked at both the images and why someone very senior had not been immediately made aware of what the children had seen."
The tribunal heard that Mr Nel had not known that these search queries had been discovered by his superiors and printed out on that same evening
Miss Harper said that when he brought his version of the documents to her the next morning, she noticed the two searches, from Terminal 13 and Terminal 17, had gone missing
Following his formal dismissal from the prep school, Mr Nel contacted the school to raise a formal grievance, saying that during the investigation there had been "a complete lack of HR support, causing him considerable stress."
In a letter read out at the tribunal, he said the school had made him a "scapegoat" by assuming at the first instance that he had been responsible for changing the browser history
During cross-examination it was revealed that experts from Answers Investigation, a firm hired by the school to determine how the searches were deleted, revealed that the search words would have been changed before Mr Nel logged onto the system at 9.35am on a Monday morning
The employment tribunal in which Mr Nel is suing his former school employers was adjourned until today
Answers Investigation in the Daily Telegraph reporting on an Employment Tribunal involving Computer Forensic Investigation
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