Teacher, 25, who has sex with ex-pupil banned from profession
A YOUNG teacher has been banned from the profession after having sex with a boy who had just left a top boarding school.
Ruth Vaughan, who was 24 at the time, began a relationship with the teenager after first kissing him and exchanging phone numbers at a leavers’ ball.
She then visited the boy – six years her junior – during his second week at university and had sex with him there.
A tribunal ruled that she had abused her position of trust by entering into the relationship even though the pupil had already left the school. Vaughan, now 25, was a design and technology teacher at £30,000-a-year Oakham School in Rutland.
Former pupils at the school, founded in 1584, include actor Matthew Macfadyen, England cricketer Stuart Broad, and England rugby stars Lewis Moody and Tom Croft.
The sixth-former, named only as Student A, told the disciplinary hearing that he had began a sexual relationship with Vaughan after leaving school.
Vaughan, who gave evidence via video-link from Saudi Arabia where she now lives, started work at Oakham School in September 2012 as a newly qualified teacher.
She said she had first kissed and engaged in sexual activity with Student A at the end of August 2013. Although she had not taught the boy, she had contact with him at the school’s combined cadet force, the hearing in Coventry was told.
Vaughan said she then had sex with Student A during his second week of university. She accepted during her evidence that the timing did not make any difference to the appropriateness of the relationship.
She expressed regret that it had ever happened. Vaughan was found guilty of unacceptable professional conduct and banned indefinitely from teaching in any school, sixth-form college, youth accommodation or children’s home in England.
Alan Meyrick, who chaired the Professional Conduct Panel hearing, said that Vaughan’s relationship with Student A was the result of her being in a position of trust.
He said that despite the student having recently left the school “the panel considered that the expectation of the obligations upon Miss Vaughan would not have changed overnight”.