RE teacher banned for telling pupils to 'sleep around'

A RELIGIOUS EDUCATION teacher who swore at her pupils, showed them her tattoos and told them not to get married so they could "sleep around", has been banned from the classroom for at least five years.

Education secretary Michael Gove called 27-year-old Catherine Reynolds a "disgrace to the profession" after a disciplinary panel issued the ban yesterday.

As well as telling students to have "lots of sex", Reynolds conducted "expletive-ridden lessons" at Saddleworth School in Oldham before being suspended in March, 2011. She told pupils to "sit on your arse" and told them if they didn't want to learn RE, they could "piss off", the Daily Mail reports.

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The panel also learned that she told her class about a sex show involving a horse she had seen in Amsterdam and referred to parents as "retarded" on her Facebook page.

After attending a parents' evening at the school she took to the social networking site again, describing the event as "the most f***ing horrendous evening of my life".

Other offences included regaling her pupils with her first-hand experience of the morning-after pill, a relationship with an older man and binge drinking. The panel also found she surfed the internet when she should have been teaching RE, The Sun says.

Reynolds began teaching at Saddleworth School in September 2008 and "initially showed herself to be good at her job," the paper says. But two years later she posted some "wholly inappropriate" comments on Facebook and the school began to get complaints about other aspects of her teaching.

There was some support for Reynolds on Twitter today from people claiming to be her former students and others who wished they had been. "I wish Catherine Reynolds had been my RE teacher instead of Reverend Smith," tweeted one user.