Red faces over school's gossip website

With the advent of the Friends Reunited website, school gossip reached new heights. For pupils unwilling to wait until they actually leave their alma mater, however, the latest internet trend is for sites which deal with current classroom gossip.

But one school's tittle-tattle web space has overstepped the mark.

Pupils from the £20,000-a-year Westminster School have found access to their site banned by teachers after it became a repository of sexual scandal and innuendo.

Highlights of the site include a diagram linking pupils known to have had close encounters with each other and a section where pupils can rate their classmates' prowess.

The site, www.westminstertree.tk, has recorded some 17,000 visits. It includes more than 600 photos of pupils in various states of apparent drunkenness and dress and promises "127,117 possible pairings" between pupils to make sure "prep boredom will become a thing of the past".

When the school - whose ex-pupils include Dido, Helena Bonham Carter and, appropriately enough, the internet entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox - found out about the site it felt it had to act.

Staff were horrified to discover that not only was the site filled with pornographically detailed gossip, but pupils were also accessing it from the school library.

The site was promptly blocked from being viewed on the boarding and day school's own computers but pupils have taken to accessing it from home.

Among the rated sexual encounters are edited comments such as "I could not resist... huge... all night long... you have to try him" and "after a long period of frustration between the two they decided to hop on the good foot and do the bad thing".

The school, which can trace its origins to the 12th century and also boasts Tony Benn, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Peter Ustinov among its roster of distinguished former pupils, is one of the best known and most prestigious independent schools in the country.

Headteacher Tristram Jones-Parry said the school had also investigated the possibility of closing the site.

"I find it all rather silly and childish really," he said. "What used to be done through whispers and little bits of paper passed around at the back of class is now thrown all over the internet.

"We believe we know the boy involved and I understand we have contacted him to ask him to tone the content down a bit.

"It is the sort of stuff you expect from a 13- or 14-year-old but this boy is 20 and is still concerning himself for some reason with his old school. It is rather sad, all in all.

"We have a filter that automatically blocks access to the site from school computers but that is all we can do.

"It is a long way from the worst thing you can find on the web but the internet does rather give a new dimension to the usual teenage desire to engage in fantasy."