Teaching Personnel Ltd. a supply teacher recruitment agency booked me for 90 days of teaching work in 14 different schools in 2001. But suddenly the bookings dried-up after I was publicly attacked (see here) for winning a settlement in November 2001 for discrimination by Telscombe Cliffs School who threw me out of school in March 2001 (see here).For several years afterwards Teaching Personnel Ltd. made all sorts of excuses to not give me any more work when other teachers I know were getting as much as they wanted. But parents from Telscombe Cliffs School had complained about having me teach their kids so I was thrown out (see here). Later staff parents and governors ganged up to attack me in the press with a letter writing hate campaign (see here). It turned out that Teaching Personnel Ltd. together with other agencies (see here) and schools have "widely blacklisted" me according to a Tribunal Judgment funded by the (former) Equal Opportunities Commission. I have been prevented from employment as a teacher ever since.
Teaching Personnel Ltd. keep a highly irregular and secret “offline data base” in which I am “blacklisted”. I possess actual documents, letters and my own personnel records with the word "blacklisted" printed on them. I didn’t find out about this despite over four years of putting pressure on them. They illegally withheld the existence of the data base from a 12 February 2004 Data Protection Act (DPA) disclosure. They eventually admitted its existence to the Recruitment and Employers Confederation (REC) in January 2007. But the REC didn't tell me until April 2007. To get this information I had to complain to the REC for not adhering to their own complaints procedures. The REC then sent back dated letters to me to cover their tracks (see here).
Teaching Personnel Ltd. insist on telling schools I'm transgender as a pre-condition to offering me any work. They told me in a phone call the reason was: - “to obviously let them know what's actually happened, because it's a little bit of a different case isn't it?" (that I taped it for accuracy on 4 November 2003.) The agency refuse to acknowledge or withdraw this pre-condition. According to page 12 of the ‘Women and Equality Unit’ Employers Guide: "It is unlawful for a recruitment agency to discriminate in the terms on which it offers to provide any of its services to transsexual people, or by refusing or deliberately omitting to provide them, or in the way in which it provides any of them."
Because of they refused to offer me work any more, I lodged claims at the Employment Tribunal as a 'litigant-in-person' against Teaching Personnel Ltd. on 3 February 2004 and against three other supply teacher employment recruitment agencies later that year too (see here and here). During the Tribunal process I found out that Teaching Personnel Ltd. had secretly withheld 479 one-day bookings could have been offered to me in the 6 months up to 5 February 2004 with 62 of them in my specialist subject areas. Block bookings of 52 days at Brighton College of Media Arts and another for 116 days at Falmer School were withheld from me. I was offered no work at all even though Teaching Personnel Ltd. had booked me into Falmer before.
I first found out Teaching Personnel Ltd. had “blacklisted” me on 9 February 2004 in a Data Protection Act disclosure from them. This was 5 days after the time limit ran out to lodge Tribunal claims against them on 4 February 2004. The agency’s 'call logs' twice recorded that I’d “rang in wanting to come back online but she’s been blacklisted. Will speak to Caroline [McCarthy] about it" in September 2003.
So I wrote to Caroline McCarthy Principal Education Officer at Teaching Personnel Ltd. in January 2006 to ask about being “blacklisted”. Her reply misled saying it had been dealt with by the Tribunal when it had not; I found out about being “blacklisted” after the claim was lodged. Also at that time the “offline data base” was still kept secret and not revealed to me until March 2007 via the Recruitment and Employers Confederation (REC).
I’ve tried many times since to get honest answers from Teaching Personnel Ltd. Their Finance Director Jonathan Roback responds but refuses to take any responsibility for Teaching Personnel Ltd.'s part in keeping me out of school classrooms by “blacklisting” me in their “offline data base”.Conclusion:
Teaching Personnel Ltd. took full advantage of my illness and that I was a litigant in person to get away with discriminatory practice and victimisation by deceiving the Tribunal.
Next:
Because the Employment Tribunal was so very bent for striking out my cases against Teaching Personnel Ltd. and the other agencies when I was too ill to proceed in August 2005 (see here) I asked:-
a) the Recruitment and Employers Confederation to hold the agencies to account, but they refused (see here); and
b) the government's Employment Agencies Standards Inspectorate to prosecute two of the agencies under the Employment Agencies Act 1973 but they too covered up for the agencies (see here).
a) the Recruitment and Employers Confederation to hold the agencies to account, but they refused (see here); and
b) the government's Employment Agencies Standards Inspectorate to prosecute two of the agencies under the Employment Agencies Act 1973 but they too covered up for the agencies (see here).
Teaching Personnel visits to a related blog: -
Click on images to see February and June logs...
