A physical education (PE) teacher has been banned from teaching after falsely claiming to have played for two prominent football clubs in order to secure his job, only to be exposed by students. Aaron Smith, a 44-year-old from the Wirral, repeatedly lied about his professional football background during job applications, a misconduct panel of the Teaching Regulation Agency has determined.
Smith claimed to have been a professional footballer at Leicester City from June 2000 to December 2001, as well as a player and apprentice at West Bromwich Albion from 1997 to 2000. He also falsely stated that he had represented England Schoolboys at under-15 level and had played for both Leicester and Albion between the ages of 11 and 20.
Moreover, Smith went as far as fabricating team sheets with his name included among England youth team players and altering a photo of the current team to feature his face, which he showed to students. His deception began to unravel in February 2016 when inconsistencies emerged after he gave an assembly recounting his supposed professional football experiences at Leicester.
Subsequently, Smith took up a role as a PE teacher at the Co-Op Academy in Bebington, Wirral, in 2016. However, in 2021, he started showing repeated absences and fabricated names of fictitious medical professionals he claimed to have been consulting. The misconduct panel concluded that Smith’s actions were dishonest, leading to his prohibition from teaching for a minimum of five years.