A 30-year-old Kent school teacher who downloaded child pornography from the internet has been jailed for 18 months.

Police discovered 310 images involving youngsters among more than 100,000 pornographic photos on Geoffrey Sharp’s home computer in February.

Maidstone Crown Court heard that six of the child porn images were at the highest level of five and involved scenes of bondage and domestic animals.

Catherine Donnelly, prosecuting, said 183 of the photos were classed at the lowest level of one, while others were between two and four.

Police had gone to Sharp's home in The Cloisters, Orchard Street, Dartford, after learning that he subscribed to an American porn website known as Landslide.

In his absence, items including the hard drive were removed from his computer.

"It had a large amount of predominantly adult pornography and some child porn," said Miss Donnelly.

Sharp, who taught at Welling School before resigning, later admitted he had accessed the site out of a mixture of curiosity and stupidity.

Tom Stern, defending, said that because 83 per cent of the images found were at the lower level of seriousness and only a minority were of the more serious type, immediate custody should not necessarily be a starting point.

"The court should look at alternative ways as to how society might be better protected," he said. "This is not a case littered with aggravating features - quite the opposite."

There was inevitably a stigma, he said, which attracted the assumption that he may have done something inappropriate with children.

"In this case there is nothing to suggest that this defendant has in any way violated or exploited the young people with whom he worked - quite the opposite,” he said. “He had a respected career working with children."

Mr Stern said Sharp had suffered what could only be described as a fall from grace in terms of his career.

As well as passing a prison sentence, Judge Stephen Robbins disqualified Sharp, who admitted making indecent images of a child, from working with children and said he would remain on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.