Teacher jailed for sex with pupil at Cameron’s daughter’s school
A FORMER teacher from the school attended by David Cameron’s daughter was jailed for 20 months yesterday for having sex with a teenage pupil.
Christopher Stephenson, 32, admitted preying on the victim when she was 16 and 17 after getting her drunk.
Stephenson and the pupil engaged in a series of sordid acts while he was working at the prestigious Grey Coat Hospital school in Westminster.
The former prime minister’s daughter, Nancy, started at the school in September last year. Stephenson left back in 2009.
Yesterday, the gifted maths master begged a judge not to put him behind bars. He claimed he did not know teachers are banned from having sex with their pupils, even if they are 16.
But Judge Alistair McCreath dismissed his plea. “If they are in your school 18 years old is the age, not 16,” the judge said. “It’s not rocket science.”
The pair went on day trips together, including one to Brighton, London’s Southwark Crown Court heard.
He even took a topless photo of her while she slept and kept the image on his phone. When she found out, he deleted it.
Stephenson had sex with the girl between July 2007 and January 2009 when he left the Grey Coat school.
Allegations about the teacher and the teenager first emerged in 2011, the court heard. The girl, who suffered depression and anxiety, declined to make a full statement to police but had a change of heart in June last year.
Stephenson, of York, admitted sexual activity with the girl while in a position of trust at an earlier hearing.
Judge McCreath said Stephenson’s online sex chats with the girl before the relationship began were an aggravating feature of the case.
“It is grooming,” he added. “It is an adult talking to a child through electronic media that is flirtatious and sexual. This was lengthy electronic communication that has at the end of it a sexual relationship. If that is not grooming, what is it?”
The father of the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, became suspicious, the court heard.
But Stephenson assured him relationship was purely platonic.
The judge told him: “If anybody has it fresh in their mind that teachers should keep their hands off pupils, it must be a newly qualified teacher.”
Stephenson, who will never teach again, must sign the sex offenders register for 10 years. the