F Hell, my first reaction is that if they are letting her get away with that and not striking her off, then their endorsements are not worth the paper they are written on. I am wondering if this was why CrappyNanny turned up with a good reference and then turned out to be so rubbish.
A bit of me feels like a mug for believing their publicity and giving them money, and another bit of me is reminding myself this is only internet gossip (albeit lovely juicy gossip) so I should not beat myself up over it too much, as things are usually more complicated than they first appear.
It's difficult. DH pointed out there are two sides to every story, but I replied that as far as I was concerned, there were four sides to this story and three of them were guilty in my eyes. But I think this girl probably has never been pulled into line properly in her life, and I even wonder if there is a dodgy family background there as well (did she witness one of her parents up to extra marital derring-do on the sofa when she was a child, for example? We will never know).
The sad fact of the matter is that these days, expensive educational establishments appear to attract the rich, dysfunctional elements of society, as they have become more rarified than they ever were. So the children can be very spoiled and sometimes secretly very distressed. For example I once taught the children of a seriously up there peer of the realm who flushed their packed lunches down the loo, for example, and then when we probed about their apparent anorexia, described their father's anger management problems in frightening technicolour. I dealt with another situation where a child from a very normal family witnessed his classmate being smashed in the face and given a nosebleed by his father in the family Bentley on a day out (had to call social services that time). Abuse and appalling behaviour is by no means confined to the working classes (and the Government would be more successful in tackling it if it realised this).
There is probably also a very interesting general point to be made about certain members of this generation and their idea of a sense of entitlement as opposed to a sense of duty. When I started work I was always anxious to give a bit more value to my employers than they were paying for, and I was also mindful of the need to behave ethically. I got a lot of things wrong at times, things that make me feel a bit embarrassed now, but ultimately I gave it my best shot. I am not sure the amount of effort I put into this really equates to what I am seeing from some newly qualified young employees today. I honestly believe that they think they are trying really hard, but they are misjudging the requirements incredibly badly and probably only delivering about 50% of what is expected. That is a really heavy overhead for any employer, who ends up having to supervise and pick up the pieces, much to their frustration. I think that's at the root of it all.