# Mary Macdonald

Dame Mary Beaton Macdonald (born 29 July 1950; née Skinner) is a British schoolteacher and former headmistress who was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for her work turning around the failing Riverside Community Primary School in North Shields, Tyneside, where she spent thirteen years. == Scandal == In 2005, the same year she was knighted, Macdonald was falsely accused of assaulting a pupil at an assembly rehearsal. Two mothers turned up, obviously very angry, and one of them accused me of slapping her child… Obviously I quickly denied it; it was too ridiculous for words.