Jailed for a year, lesbian schoolmistress, 40, who swapped explicit messages with pupil

A LESBIAN schoolmistress began a rela- tionship with a pupil who had sought support about her sexuality.

Helen Carter, 40, shared sexually explicit messages and photos with the girl by phone and encouraged her to perform sex acts on herself.

In one of the messages, the pupil offered to buy the teacher a birthday cake, adding: ‘When we’re laying together and we wake up in each other’s arms we’ll smear each other with cake.’

The girl’s family eventually became suspicious and discovered incriminating evidence on her iPad.

They contacted police and Carter was arrested at the school.

Jailing Carter for a year yesterday, Judge Jonathan Black said: ‘Your behaviour towards this child in your care constitutes a gross abuse of trust.

‘She developed a trusting relationship with you based on what she perceived as support for difficulties she discussed with you.

‘You were fully aware, through your training and experience as a teacher, of her vulnerability and yet you chose to exploit it.’ Carter, an English teacher, began working at Bromfords School in Wickford, Essex, in September 2012. It was her first teaching job.

Former pupils at the secondary school, which has around 1,000 pupils and was rated as ‘requiring improvement’ by Ofsted in November after spending part of the year in special measures, include Big Brother winners Brian Belo and Chantelle Houghton. Prosecutor Nneka Akudolu told Basildon Crown Court the pupil, who cannot be named, started becoming closer to the teacher in February last year.

‘[The girl] said she had approached Miss Carter and had come out to her as she would go to her if she had any problems,’ she said. ‘It was not long after Miss Carter had declared she was also gay that they struck up a friendship.’ The teenager had just broken up with her girlfriend and had fallen out with her best friend, and spent increasingly more time with Carter during breaks and after school, Miss Akudolu added.

The girl added Carter as a friend on social media picture-sharing site Pinterest and they began messaging through Telegram, a phone app in which messages are heavily encrypted and can be set to self-destruct afterwards.

They kissed at school and also had phone sex, the court heard.

Mike Warren, defending, said Carter had struggled with the stress of her first teaching position and was ‘emotionally fragile’. He added: ‘She was a fairly isolated person and the victim seemed to gain as much from the friendship with the defendant as the defendant did with her.’

Carter admitted four counts of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust, three of causing a child to engage in sexual activity by a person in a position of trust and one of making indecent images of a child.

She was placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for ten years.