Teacher who featured on Educating Cardiff spared jail after assaulting girl

Gareth Ritter has been handed a suspended sentence after assaulting teenager (Picture: WALES NEWS SERVICE)

A former teacher who appeared on Channel 4 series Educating Cardiff has been spared jail after assaulting a teenage girl.

Gareth Ritter, 44, of Bryngwyn, Monmouthshire, pleaded guilty in October after initially denying the offence.

He was an assistant head teacher and a music teacher at Cardiff’s Willows High, which featured on the fourth season of the Educating… franchise.

He changed his plea after giving evidence at his trial. He also previously admitted to two counts of making an indecent photograph of a child and another of distributing an indecent photograph of a child.

On Wednesday, Judge Dyfed Llion Thomas sentenced the former assistant head to 33 months’ imprisonment, suspended for 30 months.

The offences are said to have taken place between May 2015 and July 2015, weeks before the TV show aired.

Ritter was sentenced to 33 months in jail, with a 30-month suspended sentence (Picture: Eleanor Storey/Press Association)

The court heard that the teacher had offered to give the victim a lift home following an event in Cardiff.

He had then told her he needed to stop ‘for five minutes’ to check a flat he owned in Cardiff Bay, taking her inside.

Giving evidence, the victim said: ‘He mentioned his wife did not know about the flat and he liked to keep his money separate. He made several comments about how I looked.’

‘You made comments there of how she looked, and how she dressed, which made her feel awkward and uncomfortable,’ the judge said.

‘You put your hand on her lower back, uninvited, and then moved it down to her backside, again uninvited.’

He went into his bedroom but she didn’t follow, so he came back into the living room and began touching her again before kissing her.

‘My back was towards the wall and Gareth was in front of me,’ the teenager recalled, adding he put ‘one hand out behind my back and down to my bum and then lent in and kissed me.’

She continued: ‘I remember his tongue going into my mouth. I was against the wall and could not step back. I turned my face away. I couldn’t go anywhere.’

The court heard the victim pushed Ritter away and told him how she was ‘a good girl’ and doesn’t ‘do this’.

The judge said: ‘She didn’t want any of this sexual contact that you inflicted on her that night. She made it quite clear that she didn’t want any form of sexual contact.’

Ritter reportedly did not apologise to his victim, but was rather described as ‘giggling’ at what had happened.

After the incident, while driving her home, he told the girl that she was not to tell anyone else about what had happened.

The victim told police about the assault when they contacted her about indecent images of her found in Ritter’s possession.

Prosecutor Andrew Davies previously told the jury the images were taken consensually with the victim and her then partner in 2015.

But they were later shared without her knowledge or permission, and she told police she was unaware the former teacher had them.

The former assistant head appeared on Educating Cardiff (Picture: BBC)

Ritter was described in court as being well-known in his local community,and the teenager, who was not a pupil at his school, ‘looked up’ to him after he told her she would ‘go far.’

In an impact statement, the teenager said: ‘Do you know what it is like to have constant doubts and anxiety over whether you have made the right choice?

‘It shouldn’t have happened and I should have been safe with you. I will not let this matter define me.

‘I ask myself not why this has happened to me but why this happened for me.’

The judge added: ‘[The victim] told the court during the trial in evidence what many, many people who are victims of sexual assault say – “who is going to believe me?”

‘Well, she is believed, Mr Ritter, and everyone knows that what she told the court was true.’

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