This teacher stole pupils’ school trip money & got banned from the classroom

Emma Finamore
05 Jan 2019

He has been banned from the profession for five years.

Placeholder — The teacher said he had been “disgusted” by his behaviour

A teacher who stole money given to him for school trips has been banned from the profession.

Andrew Cowey falsely recorded that pupils from his school in county Durham had gone on trips for free, or received funding from a charity.

But he actually kept the money for himself.

The 28-year-old, who stole money between July 2016 and April 2017, has been banned from the classroom following a misconduct hearing, according to a Teaching Regulation Agency report.

It said Cowey doctored school trip funding spread sheets to stop people seeing which pupils had paid money and he altered letters to parents to cover up the missing money.

In April 2017, the head teacher at his school told him not to take any more money from pupils for trips.

Cowey also doctored school trip funding spread sheets to stop people seeing which pupils had paid money and he altered letters to parents to cover up the missing money.

But the next day, Cowey took £170 from a pupil for a school trip and gave a false explanation to the head teacher of why he had taken the cash home.

The former teacher was convicted of theft at Durham Crown Court in December 2017 after pleading guilty.

He was ordered to pay £5,000 in compensation and given a 12-month community order.

The report said his conduct “clearly fell significantly short of the standards expected of the profession over a lengthy period of time”.

He has now been banned from the profession for five years, although the professional conduct panel acknowledged that Cowey had shown “some remorse” – as he said he had been “disgusted” by his behaviour which had arisen from the debt he found himself in.

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