Eaton Square Senior School, a co-educational independent school in Mayfair, has won an industrial tribunal case brought by a former maths teacher at the school who was sacked after sending “deeply concerning” messages to a 14-year-old pupil, The Mail Online has reported.

After the teenage girl sent Joel Bevis a bikini shot he responded by texting: “Hhhhhheeeeelllllooooo”.

Bevis joined the school in January 2018 and was fired in August 2019. After he accused the school of racial discrimination Bevis received a £30,000 settlement from the school, made without admission of liability, to avoid the cost of litigation.

However, after he was sacked Bevis began messaging his former pupils, some aged 14 and 15, on social media to offer them maths tutoring. He also made disparaging remarks about a former colleague at the school and in November 2020 two of the pupils he has messaged complained about his behaviour to their maths teacher, who informed the then head, Caroline Townshend.

The school reported Bevis to the Local Authority Designated Officer responsible for child safety who informed the police. The tribunal heard that while the police didn’t find the messages to be criminal, they were found to raise safeguarding concerns.

As a result of being referred to the police Bevis accused the school of racial harassment and for trying to “bring him into disrepute and damage or destroy his personal reputation and career”. However, the tribunal in central London dismissed Bevis’s claims and ruled that the school had reported him properly. It also found there were a number of “concerning examples” of the language used by Mr Bevis and the students and his “level of familiarity with the pupils”.

Bevis was ordered to pay £20,000 to cover the school’s legal costs.

The tribunal said: “[Eaton Square] policies (in common with those of other schools) prohibit teachers from engaging with their students on social media, for obvious safeguarding reasons. On any objective level, they are inappropriate exchanges between a former teacher whose relationship with the children arose only because he had taught them and who had been in a position of trust in relation to them.”