Teacher says Prince Harry's A-level art 'not own work'

Paintings submitted by Prince Harry for his art A-level were not all his own work but had been completed by the head of art at Eton, a tribunal has heard.

The pictures were published around the world as examples of the Prince's work. But his former art teacher claims that the artworks were completed by her former boss at the £22,380-a-year school.

Sarah Forsyth, 30, who is claiming unfair dismissal, told the tribunal yesterday that her former head of department, Ian Burke, had finished the paintings for the Prince.

The Prince, who started officer training at Sandhurst yesterday, was considered a "weak" student by staff at the college, she said.

Ms Forsyth also claims that she had earlier been instructed to write the text for Prince Harry's AS-level art coursework. The Prince was such a "weak" student that the teacher, who had marked his entrance exam paper, had said he had been "desperate" to find ways of awarding marks so that he could pass and join the school, she told the tribunal.

Ms Forsyth claims that Mr Burke would occasionally help the boys with their painting while he chatted to them, and that he also worked on the boys' paintings in their absence, including Prince Harry's work which later featured in newspapers.

Ms Forsyth, who worked at Eton until the summer of 2003 when her contract was not renewed, claims she wrote the text to an AS-level art project handed in by the Prince the previous year.

When she faced losing her job at the school a year later, she secretly recorded a conversation with the Prince on his way to his A-level art examination in which she claims Harry confirmed that he had written "about a sentence" of the text for his project.

In a statement to yesterday's tribunal, Ms Forsyth claimed that the night before a moderator was due to inspect the students' AS-level work, she was asked by Mr Burke to prepare some text to accompany images prepared by the Prince. She said she later saw the Prince sitting with Mr Burke at a computer apparently reading through her text and deciding which bits should go where.

She claimed that the Prince thanked her for preparing the text, which was the only contact she had with him on the subject at the time. But in her statement, she added: "I was concerned that this was unethical and probably constituted cheating.

"I assumed I had been asked to do this because Prince Harry was a weak student ... I have recently seen, for the first time, extracts of the written material which was submitted on Prince Harry's behalf and can confirm that it was nearly all written by me."

In a supplementary statement to the tribunal, Mr Burke denied Ms Forsyth's claims: "This is a misrepresentation of a friendly atmosphere in which boys discussed their interests," he said. "The suggestion that I finished these two pupils' work is completely untrue."

The school strenuously denied Ms Forsyth's claim she helped the Prince cheat, insistingexam board guidance specifically encourages teachers to "assist pupils with technical vocabulary in the written explanations of their artwork".

The school maintains that Ms Forsyth never sat alone at a computer preparing text for the Prince's project, stating that three teachers saw her sitting with Harry working on his coursework.

The tribunal continues.