A sexual relationship with her high school teacher rocked Sarah’s youth, but the way the Teaching Council dealt with the complaint caused her life to fall apart.
This article contains details of sexual misconduct, please take care
It was in the early weeks of her teaching placement that Sarah* fell apart. “When it came to actual teaching and being back in the classroom, I realised I just couldn’t take it.” She would cry on the way home from school everyday, took weeks of sick leave due to her poor mental health, and eventually dropped out of the course altogether. “I really, really wanted to be a teacher, so it was devastating,” she recalls, wiping tears from her eyes nearly a decade later. “I think I would have really loved being an English teacher.”
Back when she was still at high school, Sarah was a voracious reader who excelled in history and English, topping both classes at her small high school in the central north island. Mr Williams* was her teacher in her final three years and she says he showed her preferential treatment early on, singling out her work and gently teasing her about her new haircut in class. “He would cycle through picking out a certain favourite student and basically showering them with praise,” she says. “Quite often that was me, but sometimes it wasn’t.”
During one lesson in the school library in year 13, she noticed Williams was acting strangely around her. After class, she asked him what was going on. “He told me he’d never felt this way about anyone before, which I thought was a bit of an odd thing for a guy with a wife and kids to say,” she recalls. “But that was the Pandora’s Box moment.”
From there, Williams began openly complimenting Sarah on her physical appearance, calling her “hot” and “sexy” and putting his hand around her waist. “I guess it looked paternal.” Sarah was 17 years old. “I never really had any male attention before at that age, so to have someone say something like ‘I’ve never felt this way about anyone before’ is hugely flattering,” she says. “Especially when you don’t have the proper adult context, in some ways it felt like half of a romance book. The other half… well yeah.”
Just weeks after his library confession, Williams kissed Sarah in the classroom after the other students had left for assembly. Their physical relationship quickly escalated when she returned for her final term, and became sexual while she was still a student of the school. “It was like the further it got, the more I couldn’t back out,” she says. “If I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’, he would sulk and not speak to me in class, he wouldn’t even read my work. He just wouldn’t acknowledge me, which also felt really visible and obvious in its own way.”
Williams also insisted to her that their relationship didn’t break any laws – which technically it didn’t, as she was over the age of consent. “He just said it was fine, and I guess I took that at face value. I don’t know. I didn’t read the news at 17, and I just believed him that this was a non-issue.” There was also the fact that if she ever refused his advances, he would ignore her in class. “If I didn’t get through his class and make it to university, well, it’s like my entire future was in the hands of someone who wanted to have sex with me.”
After Sarah finished high school and moved cities for university, they continued their secret, sexual relationship. Williams visited twice, booking a hotel for them both times, but it was on the second trip that Sarah burst into tears. “All the secrecy felt really horrible, and how isolated I was because I obviously couldn’t tell anyone about it.” She had repeatedly tried to end the relationship while at school, but his reaction had made it easier to “relapse” than resist. Williams finished it on that trip, and they never saw each other again.
While she felt “relief” that it was over, the relationship had taken an enormous emotional toll. “I felt a lot of guilt around the adultery aspect of it, his wife and kids. The feeling was very much ‘what have I done’ and not any sense of what was actually being done to me.” She started experiencing panic attacks, culminating in a “total breakdown” in the final year of her undergraduate degree. “I became so dysfunctional I couldn’t pick my own outfits and I would be late for uni because I couldn’t get ready and I was crying all the time.”
It was her dream of becoming a teacher that forced her to reframe the relationship. “I felt that if I was going into teaching, that I couldn’t be the sort of person that allowed other teachers to do this.” She shared the details of the relationship with her then-partner and a counsellor, and they encouraged her to report it. In March 2017, she gave a detailed interview to police, who contacted her old school. The school stood Williams down, but Sarah was told that the police could not take any further action as she had been over 16 years old at the time.
“They told me that they couldn’t pursue it, but that they’d passed it on to the Teaching Council.”
Sarah had no way of knowing then that dealing with the Teaching Council would become a six-year-long chapter that would impact her life just as much as her relationship with Williams had. At the time, connecting with the organisation which oversees the conduct of around 150,000 registered teachers across the country made sense. After all, it is charged with ensuring teachers are safe to practice, runs a conduct complaints process, and is able to refer complaints to an independent complaints assessment committee or disciplinary tribunal.
Within a day of receiving the report, the Teaching Council asked Williams to agree not to teach while it investigated, and he did. Then, when they first made contact with Sarah not long after her interactions with police, she initially felt encouraged. “They told me that they had opened an investigation and would be in touch with further information,” she recalls. Sarah agreed to provide a transcript of her lengthy interview with police, and forwarded them on a string of email exchanges between her and Williams. Meanwhile, she started her teaching post-grad course, always keeping one eye on her emails for any updates on the case.
Weeks passed with no news, then months. It was when she was on her very first teaching practicum that the combined anxiety of being back in the classroom environment and the wait to hear from the Teaching Council came to a head. “I would be refreshing my emails during the day, all day,” she says. “It was when I cried on the way home from school one day that I realised that I wasn’t cut out for it [teaching]. I just didn’t know how much of it was inherent to me, and how much of it was because I was not coping with the investigation.”
In April 2018, over a year after her first contact with the Teaching Council, a representative emailed Sarah to confirm that Williams was engaging with the investigation. “I am now working with our legal team on seeking any further information or evidence,” he wrote in an email seen by The Spinoff. “There have been delays with this but the matter is now moving forward.” In her reply, Sarah expressed disappointment with the delay, and shared how stressful the reporting process had been.
“To have the investigation stall has only added to this stress,” she wrote.
In July, 2018, Sarah had her first meeting with two representatives from the Teaching Council and a support person from sexual violence prevention and support agency HELP. The meeting notes, seen by The Spinoff, show Sarah inquired again about the delays after understanding the investigation “would be a couple of months”. “Explained it can have a big impact on a teacher’s career so it is important for all parties that all the information is obtained and the process is fair,” the notes read. “Important to be thorough even though this can take several months.”
It had already been more than a year at that point, and Sarah says the investigation soon fell into a pattern: The Teaching Council would make inquiries about minute details and then fall silent, with no communication for as long as six months or more. Correspondence shows frequently the silences were only broken when Sarah would reach out to ask about the status of the investigation. “It felt like I wasn’t the victim, but that I was an annoyance.” she says. “I felt crazy calling them to harass them for more information, or just to get any kind of update.”
Sarah was so confused by the drawn-out, stop-start process, she even visited a community lawyer who hosted free drop-in sessions at her local library. “This guy mostly deals with immigration issues, and I’m there being like, ‘I’m stuck in this thing with the Teaching Council, it’s been years and there’s just been no progress and I don’t know what to do’.” He told her that she could complain to the ombudsman. “I didn’t want to start this whole process again, but on one level higher, because who knows how long an ombudsman investigation takes?”
So, she continued emailing the Teaching Council for updates. “The last time we spoke, your report was due to be sent to him. Is there any update on this?” she wrote in February 2019. The representative replied: “The report has not been completed or sent yet. I am waiting for some further information that will be included in the report… I will let you know in advance when the report is due to be sent to him.” A month later, that same representative emailed to say he was moving on from his role and a colleague would be picking up the investigation.
At the end of 2019, with no further updates, Sarah escalated matters “because the process was very obviously failing”. She sent an email to the Ministry of Education and outlined her situation: “I made a complaint to the Teaching Council (via the police) about sexual misconduct when I was in high school. It has been under investigation for two and a half years, with seemingly no progress and little contact from the Teaching Council,” she wrote. “I am concerned that there will not be any resolution and hoping the Ministry can provide some assistance.”
The Ministry of Education didn’t respond. “I guess in my mind I thought that they would have a vested interest in this, and that they would want students to feel safe and supported,” she says. “When they didn’t respond, I was just like, ‘oh, I must have come off as hysterical’. But then I reread it, and it’s completely reasonable and very clear.”
When contacted by The Spinoff, Geoff Short, deputy secretary, education services at the Ministry of Education, apologised “unreservedly” for the ministry failing to reply to Sarah’s email. “It takes real courage to come forward and report sexual misconduct, particularly when it relates to a person’s time at school,” he said. “People who speak up deserve to be met with respect, taken seriously, and supported through what can be a difficult and unfamiliar process. That did not happen here, and we acknowledge the impact this would have had.”
He added that while the Teaching Council is responsible for investigating teacher conduct, anyone who contacts the Ministry should receive “a timely response and clear guidance on where to go”. “In this case, we fell short of the standard we expect of ourselves in responding to and supporting someone who reached out to us.”
In June 2020, now over three years after her complaint was first passed on to the Teaching Council, Sarah received an email from a new representative – the third lead investigator that had been appointed to her case. He asked to arrange a time in person to discuss “where things are at” and Sarah replied immediately with her availability. They booked in a time and location, but a few days later the meeting was cancelled: “I’ve been over your evidence again and after review it has been decided this meeting is no longer necessary.”
Another six months of silence. Then in December 2020, Sarah emailed again to ask if there had been any progress. “Yes my inquiries are complete and I expect the case to be heard in early 2021,” the representative responded. “I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.” Sarah asked to be notified when there were any updates of this nature in future. “His actions had a huge effect on me,” she wrote. “Knowing the investigation is proceeding is really important to me, as it gives me assurance it won’t happen to others.”
A year passed before Sarah received confirmation that the case was to be scheduled as a “proof hearing” in mid-April 2022. The representative explained that Williams would not be present or have a representative there, so Sarah would not be cross-examined, but mentioned that she could still face questions from the tribunal members. “I know this is not a fun matter to deal with and has dragged on for a while, so I really appreciate the help as we approach the end for this case,” he added. “Please don’t hesitate to get in touch for anything”.
Ahead of the hearing date, Sarah read through her police transcript, answered last-minute questions about the relationship with the Teaching Council, and prepared herself to appear in front of the tribunal in person. “I was so stressed about it that I almost couldn’t interact with people or function outside of what was absolutely necessary,” she says. “I booked off time from work for it, I was in bed with migraines a lot. I took a whole bunch of sick leave, I cried at work a whole bunch of times, and I stopped going out anywhere at all.”
But in March 2022, just two weeks before the hearing, the representative from the Teaching Council contacted her to explain it would now continue “on the papers,” which meant she would no longer be needed in person. “I guess it was a relief, but then I got angry that I was finding out so late, and I had spent all this time anticipating this trial only to have it changed at the last minute,” she says. “I also felt like I had lost the chance to advocate for myself.” Noticing her distress, her boss gave her time off work.
Over a year later, in June 2023, Sarah received the Disciplinary Tribunal decision: Williams’ conduct amounted to “serious misconduct” and his teaching registration would be cancelled. “I was so relieved that it was over and I made a really concerted effort to move on with my life,” she says. “I was so young, and I try not to be too hard on myself, but I still felt horrible guilt about the three years that it took me to report it, and the six years it took the Teaching Council to have his name published.”
Over the course of the investigation, Sarah completed an undergraduate degree, gave up her dream of being a teacher, and got a post-graduate diploma in her current field. She worked four different jobs, lived in six different addresses, and met her now-husband. “There was no part of my life that it didn’t touch,” she says. “There wasn’t any room for the risks that you take when you’re young, because the fear was constantly there. I couldn’t move overseas, I was resistant to changing jobs because I worried about putting myself in a situation where I couldn’t cope.”
When contacted by The Spinoff, acting Teaching Council chair Patrick Walsh acknowledged that the communication and support provided to Sarah did not meet the standards she was entitled to expect, and apologised for the distress caused. “The Teaching Council recognises the courage it takes for any person to report harm, particularly where the conduct involves a teacher who held a position of trust. We are sorry that her experience of the disciplinary process left her feeling unsupported, unheard, and as though she had to keep asking for updates.”
Walsh said it was unacceptable that the disciplinary process took six years. “While we cannot address every detail of an individual case publicly, we can acknowledge that delay and insufficient communication in a safeguarding process are not neutral. They can compound distress for the person who has come forward and affect public confidence in the system. Natural justice and careful fact-finding remain essential, but they must sit alongside a strong safeguarding focus, clear communication and active oversight of delay.”
In late 2025, an independent external review of the Teaching Council found the agency had “lost focus on its core function of safeguarding children” and called for significant transformation. “The current focus on the mana of teachers and the profession must be properly balanced with the council’s statutory responsibilities to protect children from the sorts of competency and conduct breaches that create lifelong harm and trauma,” the report said. “The council needs to lead the education sector to improve performance in preventing incompetence or misconduct.”
The Ministry of Education told The Spinoff that in response to the report’s findings, wider changes have been made to the Teaching Council’s purpose and governance. “The Ministry of Education will serve as the core monitoring and policy-setting agency for the Teaching Council, with strengthened responsibility for standard-setting and oversight,” said deputy secretary Geoff Short. “These changes are intended to ensure the system, and all agencies within it, respond appropriately, consistently, and with the urgency that concerns like this demand.”
Walsh said the Teaching Council is taking “active steps” to ensure its processes better reflect the seriousness of its safeguarding role. “A major area of focus is improving how the council communicates with people who report harm and with complainants. Communication must be consistent, proactive, and trauma-informed. Complainants and others affected by disciplinary processes should understand what stage the process is at, what can and cannot be shared, what the likely next steps are, and who they can contact.”
The council also asked The Spinoff to connect it with Sarah so it could apologise to her directly, over nine years since the investigation began. Sarah declined the invitation.
Sarah still thinks of her experience every time she reads a new headline about local teachers being investigated for misconduct, and says she is speaking out for all the other victims in her position. “It just seems like such a failing,” she says. “It was obviously serious enough for them to consider censure, but it wasn’t serious enough for them to consider that I would need any support or communication or a proper timeline. It was quite evidently not a concern that this whole process weighed extremely heavily on my life.”
She also wonders what the outcome would have been if she was less proactive. “If I hadn’t pushed them so much, would any of it have even happened? And are there investigations now involving girls who were less annoying – annoying being sending an email once every six months – who are still waiting for answers?”
*Names have been changed
Helplines
Safe To Talk – 0800 044 334 or text 4334. Sexual harm helpline. 24/7
24/7 HELPline – 0800 623 1700 or txt 8236. Support for sexual abuse survivors. 24/7
Youthline – free text 234, call 0800 376 633, webchat at youthline.co.nz, DM on Instagram @youthlinenz, message on Whats App 09 886 56 96.
Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP). Here to listen and help.
What’s Up – 0800 942 8787 (for 5–19 year olds). Phone counselling is available every day, 11am – 11pm, online chat 11am – 10.30pm
