Finchley teacher of indecent assaults against two pupils

A chemistry teacher has been found guilty of indecently assaulting two teenage pupils at an all-boys school in the late 1980s.

Sally-Anne Bowen, who taught at Christ’s College in Finchley, north London, assaulted the boys when they were aged around 14 to 15 and she was in her mid-20s.

On Thursday, a jury at Harrow Crown Court found the 65-year-old guilty of seven counts of indecent assault after deliberating for six hours and 29 minutes.

One complainant told the court he had sex with the teacher “about 20 or 30 times” over several months. He said he visited her at home, considered her his girlfriend and had fallen in love with her.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court she had “drummed it” into him that he must not tell anyone about them and to keep it a secret.

A second complainant told jurors he had kissed Bowen in a café after being “goaded” into it by other boys.

A former pupil at the school, Tobias Oliver, said during the trial that she acted like she was in “a Sabrina Carpenter video” while in the classroom and “dressed and behaved more like my teenage female friends than the other teachers”.

“The topics of conversation in class often strayed away from chemistry and became quite sexual,” said Oliver, who did not know the complainants.

He recalled incidents where Bowen flashed her underwear to the class while sat on the table and went through and discussed a “sex manual” a student had brought in, which Oliver believed to be the Kama Sutra, with the class.

Richard Luker, who was head of science at the school in the late 1980s, told the court he remembered receiving a complaint from the first alleged victim’s mother after she was worried that he was planning travel abroad with Bowen at the end of term.

During the trial, Bowen claimed the allegations were a “total fabrication” and that she had a medical condition which, in the late 1980s, had not been diagnosed, which made sexual intercourse difficult and painful for her.

Bowen, of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, was granted bail. She will be sentenced on November 20.

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