Food fetish lecturer who asked female student to stuff a pie down his pants struck off

A lecturer who asked a female student to stuff a pie down his pants has been struck off by Scotland's teaching watchdog. Gavin Bradford, 37, asked other girls to smear themselves in ketchup and eggs and pour sour milk into their underwear. In the bizarre exchanges, which happened online late at night when Bradford was teaching in Canada, he asked more than 20 girls — some as young as 12 — to switch on their webcams so he could watch them.

The General Teaching Council (GTC) panel heard that Bradford told one girl he would "take delight in slowly pushing a gooey pie in her face" and asked two others to make a video of them urinating. He also told students his favourite swear words and demonstrated using them in a sentence. The Ontario Discipline Committee panel, which revoked Bradford’s teaching certificate in November 2011, said: "The behaviour may have started out innocently but escalated to the point of using vulgar language and making improper suggestions of an explicit sexual nature."


Photo from here.

On Tuesday, the Fitness to Teach panel of the GTC ruled that Bradford was not fit to teach in Scotland. Bradford, from Glasgow, fled home after the Canadian scandal and got a job as a performing arts lecturer at Coatbridge College in Lanarkshire in January 2010, where he took charge of a production of the musical Chess — telling staff there he had left Canada because his marriage had broken up. However, the Ontario authorities tipped off their Scottish counterparts.

Bradford did not turn up at the hearing in Edinburgh, where GTC presenting officer Paul Reid said his conduct fell significantly short of the standards expected of a registered teacher. He highlighted the nature of the correspondence between Bradford and his pupils in Canada, in particular the fact the "inappropriate and vulgar communications" had taken place outside of school hours. He said there was a need to protect children and maintain the confidence of the public in the teaching profession.