Teacher who offered fake certificate to work at Kelowna school banned for 18 months

A Kelowna woman who falsified her teaching certificate while working at a private school will be banned from the profession for 18 months.

Nicola Julie Pendleton submitted a fake teaching certificate in order to get a job at the independent Lakeside School in Kelowna, according to a B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation decision published online this week.

In doing so, the commissioner for teacher regulation said she “undermine(d) the integrity of the profession in this province” and her conduct was “reprehensible.”

Pendleton wasn’t wholly untrained. She received her teacher education in Australia and was given a conditional certificate that lasted six years when she came to the province. To continue teaching in B.C., however, she was required to complete some more schooling by June 30, 2018.

She didn’t manage to get the work done, claiming at some point that she had difficulty paying the school fees, but still forged ahead with finding work and offered up a fake certificate when it was asked for.

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She worked at the Lakeside School in Kelowna from the summer of 2018 to fall of 2018, when her ruse was discovered.

In May, the teacher commission found her guilty of professional misconduct.

In an investigation Pendleton didn’t partake in, a panel found that while she didn’t harm any students she also didn’t show any remorse for her conduct.

They also found that while Pendleton did not violate a technicality or fall short of an onerous standard when she falsified her professional certificate, she “flouted a basic social expectation: that people are honest about their credentials and qualifications when seeking, maintaining, or using a licence to practice a profession.”

According to the Commissioner, such fundamental dishonesty “has a profound impact on the public confidence in the teaching profession and warrants significant denunciation and deterrence to dissuade others from similar conduct.”

In the end, they decided on an 18-month penalty noting that a professional ban of this length is necessary to maintain public confidence in the teaching profession as a whole and “will send an unequivocal message that it is not appropriate to lie about professional regulatory requirements and that this type of dishonest conduct will not be tolerated.”