Top school teacher’s ban for sleeping with ex-pupil
‘They became very physical’
A DRAMA teacher who formed an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a teenage girl at a prestigious boarding school before going on to have sex with her after she left has been given a lifetime teaching ban.
The relationship began when Matthew McGowan, 38, wrote ‘Happy Valentines’ Day from a secret admirer’ in her diary when she was still a pupil in 2013.
Over the next two years at Wycombe Abbey school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, he sent her ‘flirtatious’ messages, including one that read: ‘As you know I live for the stalking.’
In evidence to a disciplinary panel, the girl, known only as Pupil A, said that on one occasion during a rehearsal he told her how much he liked her leggings before smacking her bottom.
He subsequently touched her bottom frequently and regularly pulled her ‘up against him so that she felt him against her bottom’. He also hugged her on ‘a regular basis’, and although he claimed it was an acceptable form of pupilteacher contact known as the ‘Wycombe Hug’, the panel rejected this.
After Pupil A left the school’s sixth form in 2015 they started exchanging naked photos and videos.
They went on to engage in ‘ sexual activity’ when she visited McGowan in his office at the school on several occasions, and also met in a local coffee shop as well as in his car.
A statement from the National College of Teaching and Leadership panel said: ‘Pupil A stated that they became very physical, including engaging in oral sex and foreplay, but only had sexual inter- course on one occasion.’ They met on a number of occasions between January and May last year, and Pupil A said McGowan ‘took care to ensure that their sexual activities occurred during times when other people were not in the public areas’.
The panel rejected the teacher’s claims that the teenager was making false allegations against him in an attempt to stop him getting married.
He had claimed that she visited him at school after she left to ‘unload or unburden herself of personal issues’ and also sought a romantic relationship with him, which he rejected.
However, the panel said it did not find his account ‘convincing’.
He was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct that may bring the profession into disrepute.
Allegations that McGowan asked the ex-pupil to lie to police investigating his actions in 2016 were not proved. The panel also found there was insufficient evidence to prove he had stroked the girl’s thighs while she was still a pupil.
The high-achieving school’s former pupils include actresses Rachael Stirling, Sally Phillips and Eve Best, playwright Polly Stenham and former High Court judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.
Wycombe Abbey’s headmistress Rhiannon Wilkinson said the school had made ‘significant improvements’ after an independent review highlighted safeguarding failures when the teacher’s diary note was reported in 2013.
She said the school was ‘very sad, appalled and profoundly let down that a member of our teaching staff should have behaved in the manner which he did and that his conduct was not identified and stopped at the time’.
Thames Valley Police said officers found no offences had taken place after investigating McGowan over child protection allegations.