A headteacher who provided inappropriate assistance to pupils in their Sats and told teachers the school would close if good results were not achieved has been banned from the profession.

Karen Parker, former headteacher of Robert Bruce Middle School in Bedford, also gave a pupil junk food in exchange for doing his Sats - though a professional conduct panel of the Teaching Regulation Agency ruled that her actions did not amount to “bribery”.

According to the panel’s decision notice, Ms Parker “acted with a lack of professional integrity” in the 2015 key stage 2 Sats by instructing staff to provide “more assistance to pupils than that which you knew or ought to have known is permitted under normal exam conditions”.

One teacher witness told the panel that Ms Parker’s assistant headteacher, Paul Henry, had told staff that pupils were not to turn the page of their exam papers until the teacher had looked at the answers and checked they were correct. If the question was incorrect, the teacher was to point to the question.

Mrs Parker denied that staff were instructed to provide assistance, but she said that she was aware that pupils were putting their hands up before turning the page in their exams. She claimed this was happening “to ensure pupils did not turn over two pages”.

The panel pointed out that, under Sats rules, teachers “should not look at the test answers”, and concluded that if a pupil put their hand up to turn over their page “there was a likelihood that the staff looked at the answers”.

On another occasion, Ms Parker was deemed to have provided inappropriate assistance to a pupil who was allowed to hear the mental mathematics test twice - in contravention of the rules.

The panel found that Ms Parker was also guilty of a “failure to abide by the ethical standards of the profession” by putting pressure on staff with threats that the school would close if it did not secure good Sats results.

A teacher told the panel that Ms Parker had told staff that the school would close if its results were not above floor targets. Another witness said that she had made it known on a number occasions that if Sats results were not good enough, staff members would lose their jobs.

The panel also heard a number of other accusations against Ms Parker, including that she had used junk food to “bribe” a pupil to sit his Sats.

The pupil in question told the panel that she had offered him free food to sit his Sats because he had previously ripped up his practice tests. “In his written statement, he refers to having received KFC and Dominos once and McDonald’s food twice,” the panel’s decision notice states.

While the panel concluded she had given him food as a reward for sitting the tests, it “did not consider this amounted to a bribe in the pejorative sense of the word”.

The panel also heard that Ms Parker had set off a fire alarm as a way of notifying staff that the school was at the centre of a Sats maladministration investigation.

Ms Parker admitted doing this, saying it was not her “finest hour”. She claimed she had to do it because she urgently needed to inform staff but was prevented from holding a meeting at lunchtime or after school owing to union advice.

Ms Parker was prohibited indefinitely from teaching, but may apply to have the prohibition order set aside after two years.