ABSTRACT
It was late in the evening, around 11, when Rebecca1 rang. From her first words and by the catch in her voice it was patently clear that something was very wrong. She hadn’t got far into her ‘how are you alls’ and ‘sorry to be phoning at this time’ before she burst into tears and the reason why she was ringing began to spill out. The long and the short of it was that the mother of a four-year-old boy in her reception class had apparently alleged that Rebecca had behaved in a sexually inappropriate way with the youngster. The situation was complicated because the mother had no English and ever since her son had joined the school, she’d been making repeated complaints, via her husband, about how other members of staff and also classmates treated and interacted with the boy.
