Teacher's fatal knifing inquest is postponed

A jury had been due to be sworn in at Wakefield Coroner’s Court yesterday morning as a further probe into the death of tragic Ann Maguire got under way. But the hearing has now been rearranged for November 13 and the length of time set aside for it doubled from one week to two.

Relatives of the 61-year-old Scholes-born Spanish teacher have been pinning their hopes on an inquest’s unearthing system failings which could then be corrected in order to protect a lethal recurrence.

This was after a “learning lessons review” into the fatal stabbing of Mrs Maguire, by pupil Will Connick during a lesson at Leeds’s Corpus Christi Catholic College in April 2014, concluded that no-one was to blame other than the killer himself.

Her widower Don said it appeared that the “bare minimum” had been done to get to the root of his wife’s murder in the review.

The then 15-year-old Connick had threatened to kill mother-of-two Mrs Maguire in social media posts and told peers he also planned to murder his head of year and another teacher and her unborn baby. He was jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years after pleading guilty to the murder.