Teacher jailed for having sex with pupil, 15, 'moved on from security job because she was too distracting'
15 August 2023, 07:52 | Updated: 15 August 2023, 07:55
A teacher sent to prison for having sex with a teenage boy has lost her job as a security guard because she was too distracting to other staff.
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Kandice Barber was given six years in prison in 2021 for having sex with the boy, 15, in a field.
She was given a job as a gate guard on a building site in Hounslow, west London - but was moved on to a different site after the builders found out about her criminal past.
A builder told the newspaper: "She's attractive looking, so she's already proving a hit with the lads, who have no idea about her background.
"It's no secret she's a massive flirt and lots of the staff there have already noticed her."
Another said: "No one knew anything about her until she was photographed. Lots of people were talking about her, but we've not seen her since."
Barber is said to have flirted with the schoolboy victim over texts during a schoolboy assembly, before sending him topless photos.
She kissed him on the neck and whispered “What do you want to do now?” She then drove him to a field, where they had sex.
Barber's judge branded her "beyond despicable".
Her then-husband Danny Barber, 40, stuck by her during the trial which received national attention, even posting a photo to social media that told her he loved her "with all of my heart".
The pair have since divorced.
"Until you're in that position, when it's your wife or your husband and you're living that life, you don't know what you're going to do. She was adamant she was innocent. I loved her and I believed her," he later told the Mail.
"It wasn't just about sticking by her. Kan had three kids. I'm not their dad, but I was married to their mum, so I wasn't prepared to let them be ripped apart.
"But we haven't been together since she went to prison and I haven't seen her for almost a year."
The pair met in 2015 via a dating site and were married for five years.
Police visited their house in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, March 2019, when Danny was getting ready early in the morning for a shift as a trainee supermarket manager.
Officers let themselves in with Barber's keys, as she had already been arrested, and took away phones and computers. She had left for work as normal.
He asked "was I being stupid?" over the affair, in which it emerged she told the boy he had a bigger penis than her husband.
"I'm a man. It's bad enough to be told your wife has slept with someone else but for it to be a child... It deflates you completely. You look at yourself and think: 'What have I done wrong?'" he said.
"What crosses someone's mind to think it's OK to even look at a child in that way, let alone that it's OK to...? Maybe I didn't want to believe that my wife could do that."
He added: "Why would this boy say she'd done that stuff just for the sake of it? It doesn't make sense. None of it does.
"Our sex life was... there was no reason for me to think she had a need to go somewhere else. I didn't suspect anything was wrong until the day the police came to our house."
Despite his initial support for her, he began to look at her differently during her spell in jail.
"When I took the kids to visit Kan in prison, she'd be smiling and bubbly and happy. Her hair was done. I'd sit there and feel: 'This is wrong. You're smiling and happy in a place we shouldn't be coming to visit you.'"
He said she once called in the hope of getting "romantic" but got upset when he told her he didn't fancy it.
He started refusing to pick up the 37-year-old's calls until their marriage ended when Barber filed for divorce. Now he has found love with a new woman, Charlotte, who he met in June 2022.
She picked up some of her belongings when she visited the home in January but they have not seen each other since.
"Even if in 30 years' time she were to find me, apologise and tell me the truth I'd want her to. It's the not knowing that's so hard," he said.
"Although the fact I say I don't know if she's innocent probably says it all."
