A north-east teacher has been struck off after he was jailed for downloading thousands of child porn images.
Former Portlethen Academy teacher Alan Nardoni was sentenced to three-and-a-half years last summer after he was caught with almost 7,000 indecent images and videos of children.
The sheriff dealing with the 36-year-old’s case described the images as “truly dreadful” and some of the worst she had come across.
Now the General Teaching Council of Scotland (GTCS) has banned him from the classroom, ruling that he is unfit to teach.
They added that if he was allowed to remain on the register, the public would have “no confidence in the teaching profession”.
Nardoni – who also coached the school’s under-14s boys’ football team – amassed a huge collection of images over a six-year period. He continued offending even after he knew that police were investigating him.
His stash of at least 1,141 videos and 5,904 images – which he kept on two laptops, a memory stick and several DVDs – included two videos of baby boys being sexually assaulted.
Several of the images were at the most serious end of the scale, and involved children, mostly boys, aged between one and 15.
After a disciplinary hearing, the GTCS yesterday ruled that Nardoni had “failed to uphold standards” required of a teacher through his crimes, which involved possessing and distributing the images between February 18, 2006 and August 7, 2012 at addresses in Aberdeen, Cumbernauld and Kilmarnock.
In their ruling, the panel referred to the code of professionalism and conduct which states that teachers “must not, by any means or in any circumstances, make, view or access illegal or inappropriate images of children”.
They added: “The panel found that the respondent’s convictions demonstrated that he had failed to avoid a situation in which he was found to be in breach of the criminal law in that he was convicted on three charges involving the possession, taking and distribution of indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children.
“The respondent had also failed to uphold standards of personal and professional conduct by engaging in conduct which reflects adversely on his integrity and which, if he were to remain on the register, would lead to the public having no confidence in him as a teacher and no confidence in the teaching profession.”