A 32-year-old former teacher at Newington College, one of Sydney’s best-known private schools, is facing nine charges of sexual offences against a student under 16. Diandra Kondou, a Greek Australian who at the time used the surname Haralambidis, has not entered a plea. The charges have not been tested in court.
Court documents cited by Australian media put the alleged offences over six months in 2017, when she was a geography teacher at the school. The charges include aggravated sexual assault, sexual acts against a minor, and online solicitation of a child. Prosecutors say she showed the student obscene material and then emailed him, which they describe as grooming, and that some alleged acts took place on the school grounds at Stanmore during school hours. They say the offences are aggravated because she was in a position of authority.
Other charges relate to a senior boys’ trip to Fitzroy Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, about 1,900 kilometres from Sydney. Prosecutors allege she sexually touched the student twice on the trip, and that a more serious assault followed.
Kondou left Newington in 2019 after the school was told of the allegations. In 2024 she was hired at Georges River College, a public school in Oatley, in southern Sydney. None of the nine charges relate to that job. After the allegations surfaced, New South Wales education minister Prue Car ordered an urgent review of how she was hired, and of what agencies knew. Education authorities were told of the police investigation in 2024.
She was arrested in September 2026 and appeared at Sutherland Local Court. She was released on conditions that include handing over her passport and reporting to a police station every day. She is banned from working with children, entering school grounds, and contacting the complainant or witnesses. The New South Wales education authority has cancelled her teaching accreditation, and she has been suspended without pay. She is due back at Burwood Local Court in November.
The case follows charges, months earlier, against another Newington teacher over the alleged online abuse of a 14-year-old girl. The school said it would not tolerate conduct that broke its standards or the law. Newington’s fees are above $33,000 a year. It now takes boys and girls, from pre-primary to secondary, with campuses in Stanmore and elsewhere in Sydney.