Blue Coat Part Two: ‘It was one of those moments where you were like: ‘surely he can’t have said that’

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In 2012, on the night of the Year 11 leaver’s prom, Blue Coat assistant deputy Nick Barends was up on stage. He was handing out joke awards to pupils of the sort that are customary at such events: the most likely pupil to become Prime Minister; the pupil most likely to end up in jail. 

But Barends was putting his own unique spin on proceedings – and exhibiting a streak of cruelty that instantly shocked some of the teenagers present and has left emotional scars ever since. Calling one particular boy up to the stage, Barends crowned him “the student I’d least want to get in a taxi with”. 

The joke prompted loud laughter from some of those who understood the obscure reference, but almost as soon as the words had left his mouth, one girl who was present burst into tears and left the room.

“To be honest, it just floored us — it was one of those moments where you were like: ‘surely he can’t have said that,’ a friend of the girl who left the room told us. “All the boys went wild, this lad got up on stage — they were all laughing and joking and hugging.” 

The taxi story Barends was joking about involved an incident a few years prior, in which a male student at the school had sexually assaulted a girl in a taxi on the way back from a party. That was the girl who left the assembly in tears. 

We’ve since spoken to that girl, whose name we are withholding at her request. She says she was tormented in her school years by “constant jokes by the lads” about the sexual assault, including students shouting the boy’s name whenever she walked by in the corridor. That kind of treatment from her fellow students was one thing. But to see one of the school’s most senior teachers joining in – and emboldening her bullies – was a new kind of horror. 

And it wasn’t an incident that could have gone unnoticed by Blue Coat’s senior management. “There were so many other teachers at that prom,” says a student who witnessed the incident. “But no one did anything. No one even checked on [her]”. 

Despite the shock and pain experienced by the female student who had been assaulted, Barends’ prom night joke seems to have been ignored. But later on, when the student who committed the alleged sexual assault was given a senior student position, there was fury from some of the girls at the school. At that stage, the school realised it could no longer ignore the anger, so called the girl in for a meeting with senior leadership. 

In her telling, she was told in no uncertain terms that “if I went to the police it would be terrible for the guy’s university career and that it was just hearsay anyway”. Her parents are still not aware of what happened. She also told The Post that she has been in therapy since the age of 14 as a result of the assault and its aftermath, and was self-harming through most of her school life. 

“A lot of jokes [were made] in the corridor in front of teachers, mainly Barends,” she says. “I’ve blocked out a lot of my school life at Blue Coat. I blocked it out because of the trauma”. For the next decade, she tried to get on with her life.