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| HEADMASTER GRAHAM DANIELS |
A teenager walks silently along the red-carpeted corridor of a large building. As he goes, he switches on the camera on his phone and begins recording. Heavy breathing can immediately be heard in the background of the resulting internet video clip.
It is coming from behind an office door straight in front of the youngster. The breathing and other audible indications of sexual activity get louder the closer he gets to the door.
Then, moments before the grainy footage ends, a female voice utters what sounds like: ‘Oh, yes.’ The tape, or rather soundtrack, lasts little more than 30 seconds. The repercussions of it, however, have been far reaching.
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| CHEMISTRY TEACHER - BETHAN THOMAS |
Had they retired to the privacy of a hotel room, say, you would not be reading this. But the sex session took place in Mr Daniels’ study at Bryn Tawe secondary school in Swansea, South Wales.
The unnamed boy who made the recording was a pupil at the school, and he posted the incriminating ‘evidence’ online. It is still circulating on the internet. To date, more than a million people have listened to it.
Might the behaviour of 6ft 3in Mr Daniels and brunette Miss Thomas both married but not to each other conceivably be attributed to an isolated moment of reckless abandon?
No. Precisely the opposite is true. Their year-long affair, played out at a disciplinary hearing in Cardiff this week, was more reminiscent of a long-running, trouser-dropping farce. The pair were caught in flagrante on the school premises not once, not twice, not three times but on at least five separate occasions.
There was the time the school’s exam officer found them together in Miss Thomas’ office (‘Bethan was standing by a screen, flushed in the face, and Graham’s hands were shaking.’)
The same member of staff also walked in on them in Mr Daniels’ office after she had gone to see him to ask for compassionate leave following a death in the family. (‘They both looked startled to see me. I noticed the blinds were down and Bethan was pulling her skirt down at the back.’)
An administrative officer was privy to a similar encounter in Mr Daniels’ office (‘I saw Graham and Bethan kissing over a desk,’ she said. ‘It was not just a peck on the cheek, it was more of a snog.’)
One sixth-form girl told how she was sitting outside the head’s office waiting to be picked up by her parents when Miss Thomas went into the room. Soon, she said, suggestive noises were coming from inside. She said she was so embarrassed she had to leave.
Pupils mockingly called Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas ‘Team GB’ a nickname derived from the initials of their first names Graham and Bethan. A picture of Miss Thomas holding a book went online at the height of the scandal.
The caption, written no doubt by one young wag, read: ‘My favourite book is Fifty Shades Of Graham’ — a humorous reference to the kinky novel by EL James.
Behind the sniggers and the jokes, though, is a much more serious story. Colleagues of the couple, called as witnesses at the fitness to practise hearing, claimed their affair distracted pupils during their GCSE exams and caused results to suffer last year when just 60.4 per cent of students gained a minimum of five A* to C grade GCSEs. This compared to 66 per cent in 2013.
Parents were unhappy about the way the scandal was handled by the school hierarchy.
At a special assembly, after the sex tape went viral on April 15 last year, pupils at Bryn Tawe not the protagonists themselves — were blamed for damaging the reputation of the school by sharing the clip on social networking sites.
It would be difficult to find a more glaring example of the ‘pot calling the kettle black’.
Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas were suspended shortly afterwards and subsequently resigned. But why, some parents demanded to know, did it take the board of governors until then to investigate their sexual shenanigans, which had been common knowledge for months? At least one father we know of considered removing his son from Bryn Tawe.
In any event, Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas have now paid a heavy price for their sexual indiscretions. The affair has cost them almost everything: their reputations, their marriages (both are believed to be going through divorces) and their careers.
The pair — who are still an ‘item’ according to sources at the school have been working as supply teachers since their ignominious departure from Bryn Tawe, but the disciplinary tribunal culminated this week with them being banned from any classroom for three years. Mr Daniels has now opened a coffee shop in Swansea. His fall from grace has been spectacular.
Not so long ago, he was among the most high-profile and successful heads in Wales.
He took over the helm of Bryn Tawe, a 750-pupil Welsh language secondary school, five years ago. Previously, he taught ICT (information and communications technology) at the school, a role he combined with being deputy head.
Under his dynamic leadership, Bryn Tawe went from strength to strength. In 2012, it topped the Welsh government’s league table for the best-performing secondary school in the principality.
The following year, the school was rated ‘excellent’ by the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted and was ranked the best school in Wales by the respected Western Mail newspaper, which publishes an annual guide to secondary education in the region.
‘I wouldn’t say there’s any magic formula, apart from dedication and a lot of hard work,’ Mr Daniels told the paper.
‘I’m privileged to lead such a fantastic team.’ One of his ‘handpicked’ team, of course, was Bethan Thomas. She joined the staff more than seven years ago as a chemistry teacher and was later promoted to assistant head.
To begin with, there was nothing to suggest that the relationship between head and assistant head was anything other than strictly professional. Both of them, to all intents and purposes, appeared happily married, after all.
Mr Daniels and his wife Heledd, a GP, had been together for nearly 30 years. They had four children and lived in the Carmarthenshire village of Llandybie, a 30-minute drive from Bryn Tawe.
Miss Thomas and her husband, Carl Bale, the deputy head at another local school, had two young children. Their bungalow was situated at the end of a cul-de-sac in Pontardawe, just outside Swansea.
The geography is significant. On one day, teachers noticed that Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas arrived at school in separate cars but from the same direction. It was unusual because their home locations meant they normally came in on different roads.
They also began to be spotted together outside school, once at a nearby McDonald’s. Inside school, their body language became the subject of gossip among staff and students, especially the time Miss Thomas was sitting in a ‘provocative manner’ opposite Mr Daniels with her skirt hitched up high.
One member of staff, the tribunal heard, could also see into the headmaster’s study from her own office, but only people’s legs and feet were visible from her window. ‘Graham and Bethan’s legs,’ she revealed, were sometimes ‘leaning against the door preventing anyone from entering’.
Presumably, that was the state of play, so to speak, when their extra-curricular activities were captured on the camera phone.
Soon, it became obvious to everyone that Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas were more than just colleagues. The aforementioned study seems to have been their favourite meeting place.
‘Guess who is here. OMG, yes, Team GB. They must be at it in his office,’ read a typical text message circulating among pupils at the time.
At least one teacher, we have learned, caught Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas in a compromising position but didn’t report what she had seen because she didn’t think she would be believed. Some members of staff did confide in deputy head Carwyn Jenkins.
‘Graham and Bethan had a close relationship,’ he said in his statement at this week’s hearing.
‘I had expressed my concerns to him about the amount of time they were spending together.’
But all this was to no avail, until events reached their denouement with the posting of the sex tape on the internet in April 2014. By then, the couple had been having an affair for a year and had frequently engaged in sex in his office, her office, and goodness only knows how many other rooms at the school.
‘News of the video spread like wildfire once it was on Facebook and Mr Daniels must have been alerted to it pretty quickly,’ said a friend of the 15-year-old boy who made the recording.
‘Mr Daniels phoned him [the boy] that night and begged him to take it down and delete the video. The next day, Mr Daniels summoned him to his office and asked him if had taken it down.
‘He said he had, but of course by then it had been put on YouTube, so he was fighting a losing battle.’
When Mr Jenkins confronted Mr Daniels the next morning about the tape, he feigned surprise. ‘Good grief,’ he said, ‘is there any evidence?’
In fact, as we know, he was already fully aware of the predicament he was in. The impact the affair had on the school was laid bare by Mr Jenkins.
‘Staff found it difficult to get the children to concentrate during exam revision sessions,’ he said.
‘Pupils were not focused. There was innuendo, pupils making comments or references to the video. The incident made that summer term even more stressful. There was a drop in GCSE exam results. They were not as good as in previous years. Ten pupils did not get their predicted results.’
Many of the tweets emanating from the school at the height of the scandal are still on the internet.
‘Right, we’re going to have sex in school,’ wrote one pupil. Another asked: ‘Who’s got the video of the teachers bonking then?’
‘Teachers are supposed to be role models, but these two set a terrible example to children,’ said one irate mother. ‘A lot of things came out in the tribunal that I was unaware of. There was something brazen about their behaviour.’
Both Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas said they ‘deeply regretted’ and were ‘deeply ashamed’ of the way they conducted themselves at Bryn Tawe school when they appeared before the hearing of the Education Workforce Council in Cardiff, the regulatory body for teachers in Wales.
The classroom ban, the panel chairman said, reflected the ‘seriousness’ of their conduct which she described as ‘reckless, repeated, and an abuse of trust which had brought the school into disrepute’.
Few people would dispute the decision. Except, it seems, Heini Gruffudd. Mr Gruffudd, 66, is chairman of the governors at Bryn Tawe. He hit out at the severity of the punishment Mr Daniels and Miss Thomas received and the delay in bringing the case.
‘Justice has not been administered swiftly,’ he said. ‘This episode occurred over a year ago when it was dealt with efficiently by the governing body.
‘To bring it up again so late is doing harm to both the school and the two involved.
‘They are very, very honourable people and they should have been treated as good and honourable people who have been very, very foolish,’
His attitude, many might conclude, could help to explain why Bryn Tawe secondary school resembled the film set of an X-rated Carry On Teacher for so long.
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