One of the Heathside sites in Hampstead

A FORMER private school headteacher is facing a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds after the High Court judge ruled she had misled parents.

Melissa Remus, the ex-head and former owner of Heathside School, Hampstead, was found to have misled families after offering places to pupils to sit GCSE courses – despite the school lacking the legal right to do so.

Deputy High Court Judge Peter Marquand also ruled Ms Remus attempted a cover-up to hide the fact she had taken fees from parents when she knew the Department of Education had yet to grant permission for pupils over the age of 14 to join.

Ms Remus denied the allegations and accused former colleagues of working maliciously to undermine her and the school.

But the judge disagreed and called Ms Remus’s evidence “unconvincing, evasive and unsatisfactory.”

Ms Remus was ordered to pay damages and legal costs of £380,000 after two families took legal action, telling the court that they had been persuaded to move their children to Heathside by the headteacher.

They alleged they had been falsely led to believe Heathside was capable of delivering a GCSE syllabus – and Ms Remus was responsible for negligence that had effected their children’s academic development.

Heathside, which costs parents £6,000 a term, was set up by Ms Remus in 1993 and has around 500 pupils, spread across six sites in NW3.

It had enjoyed a number of Outstanding Ofsted reports and earned a reputation of being a well run and progressive school.

But expansion plans to include a boarding option and to take on older pupils in 2017 led to the school facing complaints from parents and staff, as first revealed in the New Journal.

At the High Court, the judge noted that as the term wore on, both sets of parents, who did not know each other, began to sense the school had “an element of chaos” to it.

Teaching was on a one-to-one basis, or GCSE students were asked to sit at the back of a class of younger pupils.

An Ofsted inspection later confirmed their fears, with the inspector telling the parents they would need to find new schools for their children.

Mr Marquand heard that one of the over-age pupils was hidden in a office for two and a half days so inspectors would not spot him.

Ms Remus claimed the pupil had been misbehaving and it was not an attempt to mislead inspectors.

Heathside later went into administration but was later bought by an education trust, Dukes. Ms Remus is no longer involved in the school, which has a whole new management.

The school’s ownership of the Old White Bear pub has previously caused frustration among residents in Hampstead. The upstairs floor had been used as a classroom but pledges to get the ground floor pub – one of the oldest in the area – reopened were not fulfilled.