Why are so many teachers having sex with their pupils?

But Christopher Drake actually coined it for himself and it must have been more of a humiliation than an egoboost for the former acting deputy head teacher of a secondary school in Greater Manchester to hear the tag read out in court this week.

He had used it as a sign-off in text messages to a 14-year-old girl from his school whom he went on to seduce.

Yesterday Drake, who is now 29, was jailed for six years after sleeping with two girls from the age of 14 and one 16-year-old. He admitted 25 offences including sexual activity with a child and taking indecent photographs.

The judge told him he had received his “comeuppance in spectacular fashion” on Valentine’s Day last year, when two of the girls discovered he was seeing them at the same time and one of them made such a scene that the neighbours called 999.

The case is the latest in what seems like a long line: last November a religious education teacher was given community service and banned from the classroom for an affair with a 16-year-old pupil; days earlier a woman teaching assistant was jailed for 16 months for having sex with two disruptive 15-year-old boys; in September a sex education teacher got four years for an affair with a pupil that started when she was 15; and last March a martial arts teacher – hired to replace another teacher facing allegations of sex with a pupil – was jailed for a relationship with a 15-year-old.

Meanwhile on the small screen the prime-time BBC drama Waterloo Road is running a plot in which an 18-year-old student gets his Spanish teacher pregnant.

The plotline is being portrayed sympathetically as a tender love story.

The law has always come down heavily on adults who have sex with anyone under the age of 16 – the age of consent. But for the past decade teachers have been expected to conform to higher standards: it is now illegal for them to have affairs with any of their pupils under 18. That doesn’t mean the law is obeyed.

A study by Sheffield University five years ago estimated that as many as 1,500 intimate relationships develop between teachers and pupils every year. You could be forgiven for concluding from the current spate of cases – presumably the tip of a clandestine iceberg – that the real figure is even higher.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s getting more common,” says one teacher who recently left the profession, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Students are much more sexually aware than they used to be and the rise of social media such as Facebook have brought student and teacher closer together.

"If you can see pictures of your teacher letting their hair down in their private life, you suddenly see them as much more human than we ever did when Iwas at school. These new media are bringing down the barriers, making students feel they are part of an adult world and slightly infantilising the teachers because they are now using the same social tools as the students.”

In the Salford case, Drake sent messages via text or Facebook to arrange to meet the girls and then filmed himself having sex with them. He also encouraged them to take explicit photographs and videos of themselves and send

them to his mobile phone.

“Graphic sexual images are very easy to get hold of nowadays and students are completely used to the idea of taping and filming things,” the former teacher says.

“Society is getting ever more permissive and children these days can appear frighteningly adult, certainly much more so than in my day and age.

“In the old days, when it was not illegal for a teacher to have an affair with a pupil provided they were over the age of consent, it was considered a huge taboo and anyone involved was more likely to keep it a secret. Nowadays the legal consequences can be huge, with the threat of jail or getting on the sex offenders’ register, but it is more likely to become public because standards of privacy have changed, especially for young people.”

The sense that students, teachers and school authorities alike are groping blindfold through the everchanging world thrown up by today’s new technologies is reinforced by the case of Leonora Rustamova, an English teacher known to her students as “Miss Rusty”.

She wrote stories featuring five difficult teenagers from her class which she then read to them. At first she was congratulated for “doing a superb job” by her headteacher.

She then expanded the stories – risqué plots involved drugs, truancy and sexual fantasy – into a book that she set about getting printed, again with the headteacher’s blessing. But when she used an online publishing service to do so – which meant the book was technically available on the internet – she was sacked for gross misconduct.

The head, governors and local authority said she had shown “reckless disregard for confidentiality and child safeguarding issues” – to the bafflement of her pupils, their parents and her fellow teachers who launched a campaign to get her reinstated.

But other cases are more straightforward.

Christopher Reen, the martial arts teacher jailed in March 2010, bombarded a 15-year-old girl with 800 phone calls and text messages, including one during a class that he was teaching and she was attending, as well as a picture of his private parts.

He had sex with her at his home while his wife was away, even though he knew his predecessor was on police bail for having a sexual relationship with a pupil and that two previous members of staff were in jail for the same reason.

Psychologist Dr Pam Spurr says the social distance between teacher and pupil has been eroded. “Teachers once had a mystique where you didn’t know anything about their private lives,” she says.

“They seem to be much more matey nowadays and it’s often Christian names rather than surnames. The kids are relating to them more as equals than deferring to them.

“Add to that the role of social networking sites, where you can look up anyone and see what they’re doing, what their interests are and what kind of music they like, it’s much easier for social and sexual contact to occur. But as the responsible adult it’s the teacher’s responsibility not to let those boundaries blur into having sex with pupils.”

A generation ago, she says, students wouldn’t have dreamed of flirting with their teachers. Our present culture is hugely youth-oriented, which means that teachers who want their pupils to like them may dress young and adopt youth slang and they may also see themselves as the natural partner of a much younger person.

It makes it all the more important, she says, not to have the wrong kind of person in the job.

“This man who calls himself the Salford Stallion obviously has a need for attention, to be valued in a way that another type of personality might not need,” she says.

“Of course you can find needy and childish personality types in any occupation and he might have been fine in another job. But when you have a cauldron of teenage emotions and needs then a teacher with the wrong sort of personality blurs the boundaries – it’s a very potent mixture.”