Adam Webb
Introduction
Adam Webb was the headteacher of Build a Future Independent School, a small specialist school in the West Midlands for children who could not stay in mainstream education, until a Teaching Regulation Agency panel found he had engaged in and allowed inappropriate behaviour toward vulnerable pupils and banned him from teaching for life in early 2026. His case was heard alongside those of two senior colleagues from the same school, deputy headteacher Alison Simmons and teacher Thomas Hayward, whose conduct the panel examined in the same window.
The published decision is unusually detailed because the panel set out, schedule by schedule, the specific indignities pupils were subjected to — from egg-throwing “lessons” to degrading comment — and found the headteacher responsible for the culture that allowed them.
Background Information
Build a Future Independent School catered to pupils with additional needs, the kind of small alternative provision where regulators expect the most intensive safeguarding. Webb led the school as headteacher through the 2020-2021 academic year, the period examined by the panel. The TRA hearing took place after the school’s conduct was referred to the regulator, with the panel sitting in late 2025 and issuing its determination on 30 January 2026.
Two other staff from the school featured in the same referral cluster: Alison Simmons, the deputy headteacher, and Thomas Hayward, a teacher. Their cases were determined separately but describe the same environment, and the three determinations were published on the same day, a structure the regulator uses when a school’s failure is collective rather than individual. Reading the three decisions together shows a staffroom where degrading jokes about pupils were normalised upwards, not challenged downwards.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Allegations. The claims in this section are findings of a Teaching Regulation Agency professional conduct panel, which reported substantiating them after considering documents and evidence. The panel’s findings are not criminal convictions, and no criminal charge was brought against Webb on this conduct. Webb’s response to the allegations is recorded in the published decision.
The panel found proved that between 28 September 2020 and 28 January 2021 Webb engaged in and/or allowed inappropriate behaviour with pupils as set out in the decision’s first schedule, and used or allowed inappropriate language about pupils as set out in its second schedule. Among the schedule findings were that pupils were subjected to degrading treatment — including eggs being brought on a school trip to be thrown at pupils — and that staff including Webb used mocking, belittling language about the children in their care. He also told a colleague, in words the panel quoted, that “what happens in BAF stays in BAF, it does not go out of these walls”, a line the panel treated as evidence of a culture of concealment.
The panel found these facts amounted to unacceptable professional conduct and conduct that may bring the profession into disrepute, and that by reason of that conduct Webb failed to safeguard the welfare of pupils — the core professional duty of any teacher, and doubly so for a headteacher of vulnerable children.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The panel recommended, and the Secretary of State accepted, that Webb be prohibited from teaching indefinitely with no review period and no right ever to apply for restoration. The published order states he “is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England.” In view of the seriousness of the findings, the Secretary of State also decided Webb shall not be entitled to apply for restoration of his eligibility to teach.
The decision was published on 27 March 2026, triggering the standard public record entry on GOV.UK that every employer’s pre-appointment vetting check surfaces. Because the case concerns a now-closed chapter of a small independent school, it attracted no mainstream press coverage; the TRA’s published decision is the sole public account. That silence is typical for alternative-provision failures: the pupils involved are precisely the ones with the least capacity to campaign, and the school had no parent body organized enough to pursue the story. The regulatory record is therefore not just the punishment but the only narrative of what happened to the children in that building during that year.
Current Status
Webb is permanently barred from teaching in England with no route back. The school he led, Build a Future, has no headteacher named Webb on any current register, and the regulatory record stands as the public account of his conduct. His co-respondents’ outcomes — Simmons banned with no review period, Hayward banned with a review period — remain on the public record alongside his.
Impact on Their Career/Life
A lifetime teaching ban ends not just his headship but any future employment in English education, formal or informal, involving children. The findings of failed safeguarding at a school for vulnerable children are the kind that follow a person in any child-facing work, regulated or charitable. The case, alongside Simmons’s and Hayward’s, has become part of the evidentiary record of what happens when alternative provision’s culture goes unexamined.