Teacher in the dock: I liked the attention schoolboys gave me
A MATHS teacher accused of having sex with one pupil before becoming pregnant by a second ‘ liked the attention’ they gave her following a messy break-up, a court heard yesterday.
But Rebecca Joynes denied having a ‘ powerful sexual attraction’ to 15- year- old boys, saying the first boy was making up his allegation – and that she slept with the second only after he had turned 16 and she’d been sacked from her school.
Giving evidence, the 30-year-old – who stood in the witness box with a pink knitted baby bonnet tucked into her trousers – broke down in tears as she revealed her daughter was taken from her within 24 hours of her birth.
‘An emergency court hearing was held and she was taken off me 24 hours after she was born,’ she said. ‘At the moment I have got contact with her three times a week for three hours. That’s it.’
Joynes denied bringing the hat to court in order to win ‘sympathy’ from the jury, saying she always had it with her. ‘I sleep with this every night,’ she added.
Joynes admits she arranged to meet the first pupil – Boy A – after giving him clues that helped him guess her mobile phone number during a Monday maths lesson in October 2021.
She accepts buying him a £345 Gucci belt at the Trafford Centre the following Friday then taking him back to her Salford Quays apartment, but denies his claim that they had sex.
Giving evidence in her defence yesterday, Joynes said boys in the Year 11 class had told her she was ‘so sexy’ and dubbed her ‘Bunda Becky’ – a slang reference to her bottom. But she said that, to her regret, she ‘ignored’ them, rather than taking them to task.
Becoming tearful, she said: ‘I should never have taken him to the Trafford Centre and definitely not let him into my apartment. I let my guard down. I caved in to the attention he was giving me.’
Joynes told jurors she ‘ struggled massively’ during the Covid pandemic, which came after a nine-year relationship ended.
‘I think I was obviously lonely and I liked the attention at the time, which sounds awful.’
Asked by her barrister, Michael O’Brien, whether it was ‘normal’ to ‘ engage in messaging with a student’, Joynes agreed it had been ‘really stupid’.
‘As a professional teacher I should never have engaged in anything like that,’ she added.
Joynes claimed that after she and Boy A discussed her sexual history, she insisted that he
‘I think I was obviously lonely’
slept on the couch. After rumours spread over the weekend, she was arrested on the following Monday and suspended, Manchester Crown Court has heard.
Despite bail conditions not to have unsupervised contact with under-18s, Joynes accepted a request from a second pupil from her class – Boy B – to follow her on social media app Snapchat after he asked how she was coping.
‘I genuinely believed he cared about how I was feeling. There was no sexual contact until after I was dismissed from school,’ she said, adding that they had sex after she became ‘really emotional’ following her sacking in July 2022.
They embarked on a secret relationship while she was awaiting trial for sexual activity with Boy A, jurors have heard.
But it became ‘toxic’, she said yesterday, ending after she told him she was pregnant. Prosecutor Joe Allman asked her: ‘ Did you have a powerful sexual attraction to boys aged about 15?’ ‘No, definitely not,’ she replied.
Joynes denies six counts of sexual activity with a child, two of them while in a position of trust. The trial continues.