Yorke started her career at the high-fee school in 2017 after completing her teaching masters at the University of Melbourne, and quickly rose up the ranks of the school.
During COVID-19, she and the student, who cannot be named for legal reasons, bonded over conversations conducted on the online platform.
The student, then 17, struggled to cope with lockdowns and sought additional help for schoolwork through Yorke, and the pair started to speak daily.
Yorke meanwhile, had not come out and was “deeply lonely”, but told the panel that it was not an excuse for her behaviour.
There was no sexual relationship between the pair while the student was at the school, the hearing was told.
In a message sent in August 2020, Yorke asked the student: “Should I be leaving you alone?”
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The teenager replied: “My immediate response is no, but yes, probably.”
Yorke admitted that she engaged in serious misconduct in relation to violating a professional relationship with the student, that she compromised her professional relationship and was not fit to teach.
She told the hearing in March the relationship that started after the teen graduated was “wholly consensual”, and the pair discussed the power imbalance.
“Even though we spoke about our concerns with [the power imbalance], it still exists,” Yorke told the regulator.
In 2021, the professional regulator brought in a new code of conduct that banned teachers from having sex with former students for at least two years after they graduate.
The panel found that despite the couple discussing the rule change, Yorke chose to ignore it.
“This relationship occurred despite [Yorke] being aware of the clear warnings against violating professional relationships with students,” the panel concluded.
During the hearing, Yorke’s lawyer accepted the allegations and said that her “frank admissions” and “honesty” around the investigations should be considered.
However, the regulator found the former teacher’s claim that the online message exchanges were not emotionally intimate was not supported by an “objective assessment”.
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“The emails show an increased emotional bonding developing through the extensive number of messages,” they wrote.
The teacher failed to understand that the nature of the exchanges developed into personal and intimate conversations, the panel said.
“There were also increasingly frequent references to taking the teacher’s relationship with the student to a new level once the student had completed year 12.”
According to the regulator’s decision, the language in the messages suggested the duo “colluded in being secretive”.
“There was a clear link between the increasingly personal messages and the later sexual relationship,” it found.
Yorke previously said she had no plans to reapply to work in an education setting and was pursuing a career in psychology.
She accepted the consequences of her actions and knew she’d no longer be able to teach. Losing her career and her job at the school was “horrible” because teaching was everything to her, she said.
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