UK Teacher Who Lied About Lymphoma Banned From Classroom

A 44 year old primary school teacher at Park Junior School, in Shirebrook, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in England has been banned from teaching after it was revealed that for four years she had been lying to colleagues, students and parents about having mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma. She received considerable support from those around her.

Nicola Lynne Hibberd had gone to great lengths to perpetuate the lie, including creating phony letters from physicians claiming she had been diagnosed with late-stage non-Hodgkin's.

She recently appeared before a Teaching Agency panel in Coventry and was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct. She gave no explanation for her choice to mislead those around her, nor did she present any potentially mitigating factors to explain it.

Despite that, many are speculating that she used the ruse in order to score for herself a substantial amount of time off from teaching.

Hibberd was exposed when her head teacher, Steve Hewitt-Richards, became suspicious of a letter from one of her alleged doctors and came to believe it probably had been copied from the Macmillan Cancer website, one of the biggest and most influential in the UK.

Hewitt-Richards pursued things further by contacting Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, where she had claimed to be receiving her care. They informed him that the patient was not in their database.

Despite the ban, she could re-apply to teach after five years.

Source: Daily Mail