A primary school teaching assistant who did not want her children to get mixed up with drug dealers solved the problem by supplying them herself, she admitted yesterday.

Speaking outside a magistrates’ court in Suffolk after admitting possession of and offering to supply cannabis, Nicola Cooper, 43, said that she regretted breaking the law.

“Some people give their children alcohol and cigarettes at an early age, but I gave mine cannabis,” she said.

She described herself and her husband of 25 years, Ian Leppard, an engineering company director, as being “liberal parents”.

Cooper said that she had been an occasional cannabis smoker since she was 18, and when she found out that her teenaged children had been smoking the drug they all sat down as a family to discuss it.

Mr Leppard, 51, said: “We didn’t want them to hide it, but told them it was not big or clever and they should be responsible. We didn’t want them to get involved in anything else or the underground drug culture.”

Instead, their mother became their dealer.

Mr Leppard said: “Cannabis was something we just had in the house. We have no idea how the police became involved.”

But become involved they did. On June 15, Cooper was having dinner with her mother at a hotel not far from her home in the village of Ixworth, near Bury St Edmunds, when a police officer approached the table.

He told her that he had a warrant to search her house. There he found 116 grams of cannabis resin, worth about £200.

Cooper told the police that she had been supplying her children because she wanted to prevent them from becoming involved with dealers and being lured into a world of harder drugs and crime. After being charged with supplying the drug, she resigned from her job as a support assistant at Barrow Primary School, near Bury St Edmunds.

Kevin McCarthy, defending, told St Edmundsbury Magistrates’ Court that it was ironic that she had effectively become a drug supplier to keep her children away from other suppliers.

The court was told that she had started giving the drug to her daughter when she was 16, and to her son when he was 18. Mr McCarthy insisted that she was not a commercial supplier of the drug. “The reason for the supply was to keep those cherished children away from the drug culture,” he said. “In the words of the police officer, ‘You did it out of the kindness of your own heart’.”

The court also received a letter from the headmaster of Barrow School describing Cooper as “a valuable member of staff”. A local GP had said that he would have “no hesitation in entrusting his young child to her care”.

District Judge David Cooper ordered Cooper to complete 200 hours of community work, saying that he had decided not to give her a suspended sentence because of her good character. She was ordered to pay costs of £60. He said: “She has an excellent character, but to my mind she is utterly misguided. Society does expect a school teacher to abide by the law.”

After the hearing Cooper said that she felt she had done “the right thing” by supplying her children, but added that the whole family had now given up. “The whole point was that it was a relaxing thing,” she said. “But there is nothing relaxing about it if you think the police are going to burst into your home at any moment.”

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