D Walden 
Updated August 17th, 2021
A chemistry teacher who was found to have deleted child sexual abuse files on his home computer has received a lifetime ban from the profession.
Police found 11 files known to be associated with child abuse images had been deleted from Alexander Peredruk’s PC in 2018, a misconduct panel heard.
The 32-year-old was working at St Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic High School in Rochdale at the time.
Banning him for life, a panel found his actions amounted to serious misconduct.
A Teaching Regulation Agency hearing, which Mr Peredruk did not attend, was told he started at the school in 2015 and resigned from his position in August 2018.
He was interviewed by police in October 2018 after intelligence led to a search of his home, but officers were not able to establish more detail about the images due to sophisticated hard drive cleaning software found on his computer.
A Greater Manchester Police detective told the June hearing the deleted file names were “proactively searched for on the dark web” and in groups where indecent images of children were shared.
“They cannot be stumbled across,” he said.
“The language used would not be known to the reasonable person.”
No further action was taken by police but the panel found Mr Peredruk’s actions left them with no option but to ban him from teaching indefinitely with no opportunity for a review.
It said his behaviour was believed to have spanned a period of two years, he had expressed no remorse and had not offered any explanation for the deleted files.
“The behaviours demonstrated by Mr Peredruk show a clear failure to safeguard and protect children’s well-being,” the panel said in its findings.
“Whilst pupils at the school were to the panel’s knowledge unharmed, pupils and children at other schools and communities were harmed.
“The panel found that the teacher’s actions through searching, downloading, receiving and, or viewing indecent images of children demonstrated a clear failure to follow the rule of law.”
