The headteacher and the strange case of the Ofsted “ambassadors”

It started with a routine request to Ofsted about a headteacher who had been in the news, and ended with a curious set of revelations.

Nigel Griffiths, the £140,000-a-year headteacher of John Kyrle High School, a standalone academy in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, was in the spotlight last autumn after drama teacher Joanne Lucas won an employment tribunal victory against the school.

In a ruling which featured in the Guardian, the tribunal found that Griffiths had been “losing patience with [Lucas’s] union activities”. Griffiths had emailed his personal assistant about voting integrity in a teacher governor ballot, the Guardian’s report on the tribunal judgment stated, in which he used the acronym “FIGJAM” (“Fuck I’m good, just ask me’).

The tribunal, whose judgment was made public on November 4^th last year, concluded that the expression was used as Griffiths had been banking on using the information against Lucas.

It concluded that Lucas, who had been battling arthritis, was wrongly sacked for “gross misconduct” after Griffiths had developed an “animus” towards her because of her union activities.