Hampstead School head admits calling police and warning university admissions team after student blogger criticised school
A London headteacher has admitted contacting police over a student blogger and warning the university he had applied to in Glasgow about his “anarchist” behaviour after the teen criticised the school on a blog.
Blogger: 19-year-old Zaloom spoke of his concern over 'intimidation'
Hampstead School head Jacques Szemalikowski said the blog demonstrated 19-year-old Kinnan Zaloom’s penchant for anarchism and insisted he stood by his actions.
Among his articles on the Hampstead Trash blog, which launched in February, Zaloom criticised the school for spending more money on PR than school equipment and wrote about differences in opinion over the running of school among staff. Szemalikowski had the site blocked from school computers a month after it launched, claiming Zaloom had posted “lies”.
Szemalikowski told the Camden New Journal: “In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by anti-establishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt.
"I phoned Glasgow [University] to warn them what sort of person they were dealing with, to advise them that this person thinks thoughts like these, and they could then make an informed decision. I am duty bound to do that.
“I also reported what he had written to the police, and the officer I spoke to said he would pass these mad writings of his on to a colleague.”
Zaloom, who will study mathematics at Portsmouth University this year, said he was concerned about the intimidation tactics he said were being used to “control a student’s thoughts” and questioned the school’s actions.
“They said I had brought the school into disrepute. I said that was their opinion, but nothing I had done was illegal so why such severe action?” he told the Camden New Journal.
Zaloom added that he was concerned if the incident had happened a year earlier he could have been expelled half way through his A-levels, scuppering his chances of going onto university.
In the latest post on the student blog, which Zaloom no longer writes for since leaving school, editors thanked readers for helping it achieve its 10,000th hit.