Ah, the summer holidays. Time to kick back and unwind. Take a holiday. Catch up on long-overdue reading. Have an extramarital affair.
Teachers are far more likely to cheat on their partners during August than at any other time of the year, according to IllicitEncounters.com, the dating website for married people.
There has been a 40 per cent increase in the numbers of teachers signing up to the website between 14 June and 14 August.
In June, when teachers’ minds were presumably focused on exams - and perhaps a different type of cheating - 520 signed up to the Illicit Encounters website. By 14 August, that number had risen to 730, with 173 signing up after 1 August.
Overall, there are 30,000 teachers signed up to Illicit Encounters, the website said - equivalent to 6.6 per cent of the entire teaching workforce.
Bored and lonely
More than 80 per cent of newer registrants to the site were female. The latest government statistics show that 73.9 per cent of teachers are women.
More than 59 per cent of the maritally frisky teachers came from small towns and rural areas.
In fact, when Illicit Encounters conducted a survey of 300 of its new teacher users, to find out what had driven them to spend their holidays practising this particular extracurricular activity, it found that 80 per cent of them put it down to “boredom and loneliness” during the holidays.
‘All the time in the world’
Seventy-five per cent said that they were simply looking for a fling to take them through until September. The other 25 per cent - investing in their career and future holidays in a way that would surely please the Department for Education - said that they were looking for a long-term affair.
A spokesman for Illicit Encounters, Christian Grant, said: “Teaching is one of the most stressful and time-consuming jobs out there, so teachers are far too consumed by work throughout most of the year to notice the cracks appearing in their marriage.
“It’s only when they have some time off that they realise that their relationship with their partner is fractured. Luckily for them, they’ve got all the time in the world, and an empty house all to themselves. It’s only a matter of time before the itch to cheat kicks in.”
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