The head at a top private school has dramatically quit – a day after he was exposed for allegedly having had sex with a pupil he taught 20 years ago when she was just 15.

Emma Heistein decided to speak out about the incident as she feared other girls may be at risk after Alan Adlington-Corfield recently took up a post at a top private co-ed school in the Western Cape.

Heistein’s revelations are contained in a formal complaint to the SA Council of Educators (Sace).

She shared it with Somerset College in Somerset West, after which Adlington-Corfield, the executive head, immediately resigned.

He had been in the post for four weeks.

The Sunday Times reports that Adlington-Corfield was deputy rector at Michaelhouse in the KZN Midlands for 15 years until he left in 2021 to take up a post in Kenya.

He started his new job at Somerset College in April 2023. 

In her complaint, Heistein details an astonishing letter of apology which she says Adlington-Corfield wrote to her parents in 2019, in which he admits to the affair.

In it, he says he made ‘an extremely poor decision to have a sexual relationship with Emma’. It was a ‘highly unacceptable expression of feelings for Emma and one that should never have happened'. 

He continues: ‘I have never had another relationship with a person under 21 years of age. I am not a sick predator.’

Luke Lamprecht, the head of advocacy at Women & Men Against Child Abuse, said Heistein’s case was ‘a classic case illustrating the dynamics of grooming, almost in a textbook manner’.

Full Sunday Times report