SHE FILMED THE TRUTH INSIDE BRITISH CLASSROOMS In 2005 science teacher Alex Dolan strapped on a hidden camera and walked into 4 schools in Leeds and London. What she filmed was not shocking to anyone who has ever set foot in a British secondary school. Pupils fighting on desks. Kids swearing in teachers faces. Staff shuffling the worst behaved pupils out of the building the moment Ofsted @Ofstednews turned up to inspect. @Channel4 aired the footage as Undercover Teacher, part of the Dispatches @C4Dispatches strand. Leeds City Council went to the High Court to try to block it. A judge refused the injunction and ruled the programme served the public interest. Watching a school fake its way through an inspection turns out to be exactly the kind of thing the public has an interest in. So naturally the system did what it does best. It went after the person who filmed the problem instead of the problem itself. The General Teaching Council spent 4 years building a case against Dolan. In March 2009 it found her guilty of unacceptable professional conduct for breaching the trust of the pupils she filmed. Not the staff accused of hiding disruptive kids from inspectors. Not the school that burned through 26 supply teachers in a single year. Her. She was suspended from teaching for 12 months. Channel 4's own deputy head of news at the time said publicly it was wrong to punish a whistleblower for this kind of work and that the messenger should not be shot. Press Gazette @pressgazette called the ruling a sad day for journalism. That was generous. Dolan left teaching and became a weather presenter for BBC Look East, which is either the most British redemption arc going or proof that forecasting rain is safer than forecasting institutional failure. No school she filmed faced a tribunal. No member of staff accused of gaming an Ofsted inspection faced a tribunal. The teacher who exposed it did. SOURCES @pressgazette @tes @C4Dispatches