A teacher has been banned from the profession after he made discriminatory classroom remarks, including words to the effect of “gay and transgender people are mentally ill”.
William Garwood, 60, was teaching at St Mary’s Menston Catholic Voluntary Academy in West Yorkshire when the comments were made during a Year 11 history lesson in October 2023.
The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) panel heard that a pupil asked Garwood: “Are there any just wars?” and he replied: “Yes.”
A pupil account from a child referred to as Pupil A said Garwood told the class he was “happy” that Vladimir Putin was killing “satanic Nazis” in Ukraine, and claimed the world was run by billionaires who created “evil Ukrainians”.
The TRA found Garwood’s comments amounted to justification of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in front of pupils.
It also found that, during the same class, he said that “gay and transgender people are mentally ill”, or words to that effect. Garwood was also accused of saying words to the effect of “billionaires are the cause of transgenders and they print it in the media and influence people”, which the panel accepted he had “on the balance of probabilities”.
Garwood told the panel he was entitled to his religious belief as a Muslim and to the philosophical belief of anti-Nazism under Section 10 of the Equality Act 2010.
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