Teacher who sent schoolgirl, 15, sexual messages and images jailed after failing to comply with court order

A teacher who sent a 15-year-old girl sexual messages and photos and tried to entice her to a hotel has been jailed, two years after being given a chance to dodge prison.

James Connal had deliberately failed to engage with “essential” community-based treatment for his sexual offending, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told on Thursday.

The 33-year-old groomed his victim while giving her private tuition at her home, while employed as a maths teacher at Larbert High School, Stirlingshire.

The child was not a pupil at his own school.

A jury heard he had been given her phone number so tuition times could be arranged, but he began to text her throughout the day, including during school hours, telling her she was “pretty”, that he “looked forward to seeing her”, and asked her to go away with him and stay in a hotel in Edinburgh with him.

He added her on Snapchat and sent her selfies of himself topless and with his hand down his trousers, and messaged asking if she “wanted to see something hard” and if he could put his hand down her top.

She said in evidence that he had tried to kiss her on two occasions when he turned up for maths lessons, and he had also told her to delete some of the messages he had sent.

Connal tutored the girl, now 20, for about two months from the start of October 2021 to November 28 that year.

The girl’s mother spotted some of the messages and images Connal had sent her daughter on her phone, and police were contacted.

The photographs, some taken in his classroom at Larbert High School and sent “live” from there, showed his “distinctive tattoos”.

Depute fiscal Jamie Hilland, who prosecuted the case, told the jury at the time that the implication of Connal’s suggestion to the girl about going with him to a hotel had been “pretty clear.”

At a two-day trial in January 2024, Connal, of Hallglen, Falkirk, denied a charge of indecent communication and causing the girl to look at sexual images.

He did not give evidence but suggested the photos and messages had been sent by another, unspecified person.

The jury took less than 15 minutes to find him guilty, and he was handed an unpaid work order, a home detention curfew, and put on the sex offenders’ register.

He was made subject to stringent conditions about his internet use, including retaining all history so he could be monitored, and he was ordered to attend a sex offenders’ treatment programme.

The court heard on Thursday that he had failed to engage with “offence-focused work”.

He had also deleted his internet history and, at one point, had been using an incognito browser.

Sheriff Christopher Shead said Connal had been “deliberately dishonest” and had “purposely breached” the court order.

Jailing him for 14 months, he told him: “The court told you the original order was the alternative to a custodial sentence.

“You’ve breached it not once but twice. You told the social work department you’ve done so deliberately. You failed to engage with supervision which is an essential part of the disposal in the public interest.

“Custody is now the only appropriate disposal.”

Connal showed no emotion has he was handcuffed to a security guard and led to the cells.