A former teacher at the prep school once attended by Prince George and Princess Charlotte, who paid £65,000 for sexual photos of children as young as seven, has been jailed for 12 years.

Matthew Smith was described as a “master manipulator” for soliciting the images while working at a British school in Nepal. 

The “sinister” 35-year-old recruited teenagers in India to groom children and offered to pay their school fees in exchange for sexual images.

He was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court, having previously admitted 17 counts of child sex abuse levelled against him.

Smith was appointed deputy head of pastoral care at Thomas’s prep school in Battersea in September last year following five years teaching in Nepal. But in November, he was arrested by the National Crime Agency after investigators discovered he was sharing abuse material on the dark web.

At the time of his arrest, Smith was online, speaking to a teenager in India, encouraging him to send sexual images of a younger child for money.