An ICT teacher has been banned from the profession after sending a sexually motivated email to an ex-pupil asking her to send a picture of herself.

Philip Wilkinson was also found to have asked the former pupil whether she had ever had sex, in an email exchange just over a year after she had finished school.

He has been banned from teaching but can apply for the order to be reviewed in two years after a panel described his behaviour as a “one-off incident” and said that he did not appear to be grooming her.

The Teaching Regulation Agency panel found that Mr Wilkinson had emailed the former pupil, when she was 16, in the January and February of 2017 after she had left his school the previous summer.

The offending emails that followed, which were sent in September 2017, caused the former pupil to raise concerns with her employer.

This led to Mr Wilkinson’s school being informed and him being dismissed in November 2017.

The TRA panel were told messages were sent on a school email system which the former pupil still had access to.

The panel was shown an exchange of emails which “included questions from Mr Wilkinson, seemingly without any prompting as to whether pupil A had ever had sex with a man and asking her for a ‘recent pic’ of herself”.

The panel report said: “These questions and requests appeared to have been made solely at Mr Wilkinson’s instigation and without invitation from pupil A who concluded the exchange with the message: ‘No I don’t think we should speak anymore’.”

Mr Wilkinson is said to have unequivocally admitted that the email exchange was inappropriate.

The school in question has not been named in the TRA report, published today.

The TRA panel found that Mr Wilkinson’s conduct amounted to both unacceptable professional conduct and conduct that may bring the profession into disrepute.

It recommended that he be banned from teaching but be able to apply for this to be reviewed in two years.

The TRA panel report said: “The email exchanges in September 2017 appeared opportunistic and, although distasteful, did not appear to be attempts by Mr Wilkinson at subtly grooming Pupil A in any way.

“Indeed, the actions of Mr Wilkinson were blatant from the beginning.

“While the panel considered sexual misconduct to be inherently serious, on the spectrum of seriousness, the panel determined Mr Wilkinson’s actions to be very much at the lower end and not amounting to serious sexual misconduct.

“In Mr Wilkinson’s mitigation, the panel noted that he had expressed remorse and accepted that there were no excuses for his actions.”

The Department for Education accepted the TRA recommendation.