An educator has been banned from teaching after his own prejudices affected his lessons and left students feeling totally “distraught.” According to The Independent and the Daily Mail, Alex Lloyd was working at Bishop of Winchester Academy in England when he seemingly targeted specific students during a lesson about honor killings and said “[their] culture” was to blame.
When talking to students about honor killings, he encouraged a student to think about their mom. “Imagine this was your mom being killed,” Lloyd allegedly told the student, The Independent reported. He also told two students in his class that honor killings happened “mainly because of [their] culture,” which visibly upset them.
When talking about other topics, he also singled out specific students and blamed their culture for female genital mutilation. Per the Daily Mail, Lloyd did not deny making these comments. He confirmed that he did, in fact, tell one of his students that “female genital mutilation happens exclusively in your culture.”
Additionally, he made an inappropriate comment about what one female student was wearing at school. He told her “she would have been killed” for dressing that way in Iran. According to several students in the class, he told them he felt no need to apologize if his remarks offended them. And when one student told him “we don’t believe in killing anyone in the religion,” he reportedly responded with, “So you’re all not so bad after all.”
Some students in the class said they felt insecure after their teacher used “racist stereotypes against a corner of us in the class” during his lesson. After the accusations against the teacher came to light, a misconduct panel conducted a review and found that the teacher “reinforced discriminatory stereotypes” in his classroom.
Though Lloyd admitted to making the offensive comments, the Teaching Regulation Agency found no evidence of remorse or empathy. Per the Daily Mail, the teacher even defended his comments by calling them “factual.”
Overall, the panel determined that the teacher’s actions were “inappropriate and unprofessional given the context of the learning material, the religious backgrounds of the pupils and the negative impact this had on the pupils thereafter.” Therefore, he is no longer permitted to work as a teacher in England.
“The panel did not see any evidence that Mr Lloyd understood the nature and gravity of his misconduct or that he showed any empathy regarding the impact of his actions on others,” read a report from the panel, per the Daily Mail.
