Feilding’s Pitter Patter daycare owner Pauline Murphy deregistered, ordered to pay $40k

Pauline Murphy, who ran the Pitter Patter Education Centre in Feilding, has been before the Teachers' Disciplinary Tribunal. Photo / RNZ

The teaching watchdog has rejected a disgraced daycare owner’s claim she has been the victim of a “witch-hunt” and found her guilty of years of ill-treatment of children and bullying of staff, which included her smacking a child and telling a teacher she was “too fat to eat KFC”.

Pauline Violet Murphy, who ran Feilding’s Pitter Patter Education Centre, has been censured, stripped of her teaching registration and ordered to pay almost $40,000 in costs.

Murphy’s case was heard before the Teachers’ Disciplinary Tribunal (TDT) last year, during which she defended several serious misconduct charges spanning 2010 to 2021.

The May hearing came two years after the centre was shut down after a Ministry of Education-led investigation into multiple complaints about the way Murphy treated teachers and children, revealing 33 breaches.

After the TDT hearing, a reserved decision on liability was determined in October, followed by a penalty decision last month. Both decisions were publicly released this week.

According to the liability decision, the tribunal did not uphold a charge against Murphy which alleged she had failed to provide first aid to injured children, including to a child who had broken their elbow, stating it had not been established to the required standard.

It also did not uphold one claim relating to an allegation she encouraged a parent to give their child “a light smack on the bottom”.

The authority ruled the remainder of the allegations had been established.

Those included that she had yanked a child backwards and smacked him on the hand, and forcibly scooped food out of the mouths of some children. She also regularly encouraged a staff member to smack the youngsters’ hands if they were misbehaving.

In Murphy’s attempt to manage their behaviour or punish them, children were secluded in a sleep room, and she also failed to keep accurate incident reports.

Her unprofessional conduct towards her staff was also upheld, and details of her shouting at and demeaning her teachers were included in the decision.

On one occasion she told a staff member in the break room she was “too fat” to be eating KFC, she told another she was useless at her job and labelled her a “s*** teacher”, and was regularly heard “screaming” at staff members, calling them “useless, incompetent and lazy, and threatening their teaching certificates”.

Throughout the hearing, the Complaints Assessment Committee (CAC), which prosecuted Murphy on behalf of the Teaching Council, called 11 witnesses, and Murphy gave evidence in her defence.

Finally, the tribunal found the food being served to children at the centre did not meet the Ministry of Education guidelines, including those relating to the storage, preparation, handling and serving of food, and to food quality and quantity.

According to the decision, vinegar and water were used to disinfect surfaces children were eating off, dishes were being washed by hand in water at an inadequate temperature, the menu did not provide a nutritionally balanced diet for children, some lunch meals only included one item, and food was being left on the kitchen bench before being served and its temperature was not being checked.

While Murphy denied all charges, the tribunal stated in its liability decision it did not accept her claim she had been the victim “of a witch-hunt by a small number of disgruntled employees and parents”.

“The tribunal considers that the extent of the consistencies in the evidence, as well as those matters which are incontrovertible given the documentary evidence, mean that the CAC has discharged its onus in relation to those particulars the tribunal has found to be established.”

In the penalty decision, the tribunal stated that in light of the liability findings, including “adverse credibility findings against [Murphy], the varied and prolonged nature of [her] misconduct and the absence of any rehabilitative steps or insight shown”, cancellation of her teaching registration and censure were appropriate.

“A lesser penalty would not adequately protect the public or support the maintenance of professional standards.”

Murphy was also ordered to pay $26,140 towards the costs of the Complaints Assessment Committee and $13,293.68 towards the Teaching Council’s costs of the disciplinary proceedings.

Her application for permanent name suppression, which she made on the grounds of the ongoing risk to her personal safety, was declined.

Tara Shaskey joined NZME in 2022 as a news director and Open Justice reporter. She has been a reporter since 2014 and previously worked at Stuff where she covered crime and justice, arts and entertainment, and Māori issues.