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CATHERINE Young-Southward
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Teacher faces the sack for messages

A TEACHER is facing the sack after being accused of using an internet blog to send 'inappropriate messages' to her A-level students.

Psychology lecturer Catherine Young-Southward, 37, from Macclesfield, has been suspended by Hyde Clarendon College following a complaint from a parent. She will attend a disciplinary hearing on Thursday.

The mother-of-three has been asked to explain messages in a blog, or online diary, posted on her personal MySpace internet page, encouraging pupils to believe there are 'no real boundaries'. She has also been asked to explain a mobile phone text message sent to a 17-year-old girl student.

And it is alleged that she took five students - two girls and three boys aged 16 to 18 - to a city centre bar after attending a university admissions fair at G-Mex and then took them back to her home for the night.

But Mrs Young-Southward insists she has done nothing wrong and that her modern approach to communicating with pupils has been misconstrued by out-of-touch college chiefs.

Speaking from her Macclesfield townhouse, she said that problems began after she helped a female student with 'personal issues'.

Mrs Young-Southward said the pupil believed they had developed a special relationship and then became jealous when she took five other students to a UCAS admissions fair at G-Mex on March 1. The girl wrote a note to her teacher after her parents made a complaint.

Mrs Young-Southward, who has been a teacher at Hyde Clarendon for two years, said: "The girl's note said she was afraid that she had jeopardised our special relationship and that she was going to find it difficult without me being in her life.

"I was not aware I had any kind of a special relationship with this pupil and I reported this matter to my line manager because I wanted advice. The next thing I knew I was told I was suspended, before being escorted off the premises. This is a nightmare I keep expecting to wake up from."

Mrs Young-Southward said she had taken the pupils at the UCAS fair to a cafe, not a bar, and claimed she invited the pupils back to her home because they wanted to discuss the fair, but she couldn't stay because she had to pick her children up from school. She said her husband and children were in the house when the students stayed over, and that the students - who had informed their parents where they were - had played with her young sons.

She admitted that the sleepover was a mistake, but said that since she was also a private tutor and Open University lecturer, it was not uncommon for students to be at her home.

Mrs Young-Southward has attended a number of meetings with college management. She said that at these meetings she had been confronted with printouts from her MySpace page, which she has now deleted.

She said: "I write a blog on post-modern paranoia in which I talked about how there were no real boundaries. Last year my results were the best in the college and I would put that down to the relationship I have with the students."

Students at Hyde Clarendon describe her as 'very popular' and have started a petition to get her back in college.

A college spokesman said: "Having received a complaint from a parent the management immediately suspended a member of staff pending an internal investigation."

Click on the link below to see Channel M's interview with Mrs Young-Southward

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