A YORK head teacher had an inappropriate relationship with a vulnerable teenage pupil in the 1990s, a misconduct hearing has heard.

Huntington School head John Tomsett, 54, is alleged to have become close with a female A-level student when he was an English teacher at Eastbourne Sixth Form College in East Sussex, between 1990 and 1992.

Mr Tomsett sat behind a screen at a Teacher Regulation Agency professional conduct panel in Coventry while his tearful accuser, known only as Pupil A, gave evidence.

The panel heard full intercourse did not take place in the period in the 1990s but the relationship was rekindled in 2011, when the pair had sex twice.

Pupil A said she was unhappy during the time Mr Tomsett first saw her in college. “I had a difficult home life, my dad was an alcoholic, we were bankrupt and my mum was suffering from depression,” she said.

“Mr Tomsett was very intense, he had a wonderful way with words and was quite beguiling.

“John was so comforting and made me feel wanted, it is really hard to put into words how someone can make you feel - school was my safe-space.”

She said that on his last day at the school in Eastbourne in May 1992, she gave him a card and he came into her history class and asked to see her in his room afterwards, and she felt pleased she was going to get to see him one last time.

She said he told her there were so many things he wanted to say but "could not or should not".

She said: “I asked him what he meant but he said ‘you know what I mean’. He looked at me with so much expression in his eyes and I thought he was going to say ‘I love you'. We kissed, he was perched on the end of the desk and I was standing between his legs, I felt excited but shocked. I could not understand the context of what was happening.

“In my diary at the time, I said ‘he was not abusing his position only his wedding vows'.”

The panel heard that after he left the college, during the summer of 1992, the two would meet up and became increasingly intimate.

Pupil A said on one occasion they went to Beachy Head when she saw one of his colleagues from the school come towards them, and he "just left and sped off in the opposite direction".

Andrew Faux, Mr Tomsett’s representative, said Pupil A had developed a crush on him.

“The relationship took place after he stopped teaching at the school and was very much between people who were equals and there was nothing inappropriate towards the pupil in school,” he said, adding that such relationships would be inappropriate today but the safeguarding legislation was not in place at the time.

He said the pair met in 2011 and had intercourse on two occasions, once in Yorkshire in June then in November in Sussex. Pupil A said she wanted to break the cycle of meetings with him and she suffered from flashbacks.

The case continues.