Are schoolgirls fair game for teachers?

Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found not guilty of raping a former pupil. Malcolm admitted to getting young (though over-age) girls drunk and to having sex with them in the back of his car. But he and his lawyer, Ben Myers QC, were keen to stress that the girls were all up for it. The one who cried rape even wore fishnet tights in his presence, for heaven’s sake.

So no harm done, eh, Malcolm? All’s well that ends well. Raise a glass of that cheap Scotch you kept in the glove compartment for the kids. Perhaps it’ll help you sleep. But if it doesn’t, there’s something I’d like you to think about, in the small hours perhaps. It’s something I’d like all the Malcolms to consider; all those music-teaching men in girls’ schools who’ve found themselves in bed or in their Fiat Pandas with the pupils in their care: you may not have sex with schoolgirls, however provocative you find their tights. You’re in loco parentis. It’s not OK. This idea you all seem to have that the classroom’s incidental; that under other circumstances you might have met and seduced these girls in the real world, in the classical section of HMV: it’s nonsense. Utter tripe. Think back to your adolescence, Malcolms. Were you such a hit with the chicks back then? And if not, just what do you think has changed? Did mid-life confer some special sexiness on your unpromising frame? Is it the bald spot, do you think, that makes you suddenly so hot? The fact is that you’d have made no headway at all had you not known, and had authority over, these girls as children.

I went to two British boarding schools, and in both there were music teachers in the Malcolm mould.