Senior staff at a Bradford secondary school allowed violent pupils to run amok rather than admit the school had a discipline problem, an employment tribunal has heard.

Former teacher Judi Sunderland claims the management team at Immanuel CE Community College in Thackley, failed to control unruly pupils.

She said they verbally and physically abused staff in school, including kicking, punching and butting them. She blamed the violence on senior management failing to crack down on pupils throwing "tantrums" and being allowed to get away with it.

This vindicated the comments of Ofsted inspectors that the school was "one of the worst in the country" when they inspected in 2004, she told the Leeds tribunal yesterday.

Mrs Sunderland, of Park Road, Eccleshill, Bradford, told the panel: "I was astonished by the way that senior management and certain colleagues appeared to permit some of the worst behaviour to take place.

"That was the approach of certain staff at the school and that is partly why the school was in such a state."

Mrs Sunderland made the allegations in support of her claim for constructive dismissal against the school's governing body.

Police charged the 58-year-old grandmother with assault after she restrained a 13-year-old pupil in a corridor on December 4, 2005, the tribunal heard.

She was alleged to have grabbed the boy - known for his disruptive behaviour - and restrained him while a crowd of his classmates "egged him on" to attack her, she told the tribunal.

He kicked at her shins and tried to run away - swearing at her and calling her a "fat cow" - before she managed to get hold of him, she said.

Once she had got him into her office, he threatened to "torch her house and her car", she told the panel.

Following the incident, gossip about her alleged guilt became "rife" and in a meeting immediately after the incident, the then head teacher told her things were "looking bad" for her.

However, the case against her collapsed when it got to court amid doubts about the character of her teenage accuser, who had just been convicted of a very serious sexual assault at the time, Mrs Sunderland said.

Despite the judge's comments that Mrs Sunderland should leave the court "without a stain on her character" and a letter from the Crown Prosecution Service apologising for her ordeal, governors at the college decided she did assault the boy following a disciplinary hearing and a subsequent appeal.

She resigned in March last year because she felt it was not "safe" to carry on teaching in a violent school without the support of senior staff.

Mrs Sunderland told the hearing the governors had used "perverse logic" to arrive at a verdict of guilt.

She said: "It seemed politically more attractive to blame me rather than dealing with discipline problems at the school at the time."

The former teacher dismissed evidence given to her disciplinary and appeal hearings by former colleagues, the boy's learning mentor, Ian Smith and another teacher, Mary Anderson, who claimed she had used "unnecessary force" in disciplining the pupil.

She said that, although both were present at the incident, they offered her no help at all and that both had offered conflicting evidence.

She said: "They had to concoct the evidence to find me guilty and that is what they did. When the decision came, I was devastated, my whole world had fallen apart again."

The school's governors are expected to give evidence against Mrs Sunderland during the course of the hearing which is expected to last all week.

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