School to pulp leavers' book after obscenities and drug references are included

The school has seen trouble in recent months, including an Ofsted report that flagged ‘serious concerns’ about the school. Image: Betty Longbottom (Betty Longbottom)

A secondary school’s leavers’ book is to be pulped because of foul-mouthed comments and references to drug dealing that were found after it was distributed to pupils.

One pupil at Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College in Bradford said that the thing they would miss most would be “smoking a joint at the back of the field”. Another wrote “drug dealer” in a ‘friends most likely to be’ section. Other comments were deemed not suitable for print by newspapers.

The school’s principal Jen McIntosh said that it had contacted all the parents and pupils that received the book and has asked them to return it.

“We have taken immediate action to rectify this mistake,” McIntosh told the paper. “We have contacted all the parents and pupils who received the book to ask that they return it and to apologise to them for any offence caused by the language used by a small minority of our students.”

One person told the Bradford Telegraph & Argus that students were taken out of lessons in the school minibus and brought home to get the book.

The school has seen trouble in recent months, including an Ofsted report that flagged ‘serious concerns’ about the school. Last month the entire governing body was sacked and replaced with an interim executive board in response to that report. Inspectors said governors’ actions were “increasingly undermining the capacity of senior leaders”, according to the BBC, and one of its former governors has been linked to an alleged plot by Muslim hard-liners to take over schools in the area.