PE teacher jailed for grooming female pupils and suggesting threesome
A TEACHER caught trying to arrange a ‘threesome’ with two pupils has been jailed.
James Heathcote, 26, groomed the besotted schoolgirls and pestered them to fulfil his sexual fantasy.
The PE teacher even exposed himself to the girls on a webcam while trading explicit messages, referring to bondage and strip teases.
Judge David Turner QC, sentencing Heathcote at Chelmsford Crown Court to five months, told him: “Young women in school are entitled to be protected – even from themselves.
“You exchanged messages that were plainly, openly and explicitly sexual.
"You had asked for a threesome with the young women, which they refused.”
Heathcote, he said, owed the children a duty of care.
“You have fallen far short in that duty.”
At a previous hearing Heathcote, from Felixstowe, Suffolk, admitted two charges of inciting two girls to engage in sexual activity.
He denied a third charge of sexual touching, which will now lie on file.
You had asked for a threesome with the young women, which they refused
Heathcote swapped phone numbers with the pair at St Helena School in Colchester, Essex, in October 2013 but contact soon spread onto social media sites, including Instagram and Facebook, where he begged the girls to share intimate pictures.
By January 2014, Heathcote had suggested a threesome and during one week bombarded a girl with 242 text messages.
On another occasion he exposed himself to both girls on camera while chatting to them on FaceTime as they sat in their pyjamas.
Allan Compton, prosecuting, said: “Police went through some of the Facebook messages to one girl which did contain significant sexual content.
"The messages described fantasies about being tied up, strip tease, and fantasies about a threesome.”
The explicit messaging only ended when a fellow pupil reported her suspicions.
After police arrested the sports coach he asked both girls to delete all messages in a failed bid to cover his tracks.
Heathcote will also sign the sex offenders register for seven years and is banned from unsupervised contact with under 18s.
