Teacher Ray Johnson has endured a five-year nightmare fighting off false accusations of physical child abuse. He tells Lindsay Jennings how the trawling methods used by police have left his 23-year career in ruins.

SPREAD out along the 8ft oak dining table are five huge red binders, one for each year since 1997. Below them lie five A5 diaries.

These hard plastic binders contain a meticulous record of teacher Ray Johnston's life over the past five years.

But instead of logging happy events, there are hundreds of carefully logged court dates, solicitors' appointments, letters and conversations with police and education bosses.

For 45-year-old Mr Johnston, writing every detail of his ordeal has been a way of keeping himself sane, a reminder of action taken during a time when he has felt helpless to stop events which wrecked his life and career.

Mr Johnston's nightmare began on August 15, 1997, when two official-looking men pulled up outside his cottage in Northumberland. The men, from nearby County Hall, delivered a letter to his bewildered partner, who immediately called him at the school where he was a senior teacher.

The letter said that, as of August 15, 1997, he was suspended from his post at Netherton Park, in Northumberland. "When she read the letter to me, I just felt utter disbelief. I said 'you've got to be joking'. There was no realism to the situation at all," he recalls.

"I was just fully aware I hadn't done anything to justify being suspended at all, and thought it was thoroughly wrong."

Mr Johnston, a former student at Durham University, had vast experience of working with children with severe behavioural problems, both as a teacher and a social worker. Staff at his school looked on Netherton Park as a crisis intervention centre.

"Very often, the kids had suffered emotional and physical abuse for years and years," he says. "When the kids arrived, they might be very subdued, they might be very angry, they might be disturbed, but the staff had experience to get through that."

He admits the job was stressful, but says his colleagues used to lean on each other for support.

"Yes, it was stressful, but the rewards quite frankly made it seem of very little consequence," he says.

"There was a low turnover of staff and a good team spirit all around. We had an ability to cope with these kids and we learnt to cope with that stress. Why does anyone want to teach? Because you know you can give something back to these children."

Mr Johnston would often organise fishing trips with up to 12 youngsters, softball tournaments, roller hockey, cricket, tennis, archery, weight training and badminton. Some of the experiences would stay with the youngsters forever.

He recalls fondly how he and one of his fellow co-accused teachers were sitting in a "greasy spoon" in Newcastle when a man walked in selling the homeless magazine Big Issue. The seller recognised the two men and wandered over.

"When he realised who I was, he looked at me and shook my hand and said 'Mr Johnston, it's so good to see you and he kissed me. Then the next thing he said to me was 'have you still got Ben, your sheep dog?' 'Do you remember when you took us walking up by the river and you made us jump in - it was great'.

"He didn't ask me for a penny. I went back to the car with a tear in my eye and I thought. I wish the police and the people who've been responsible for all this could have seen it happen, because that was the effect a place like Netherton Park had on people's lives."

After he was suspended, Mr Johnston spent an agonising four months before gleaning from a colleague rough details of how a girl was accusing him of physical assault. It later emerged, after checking with colleagues, that he had never worked with the girl.

He said he reported his findings to the police, who warned him that if he continued to talk to people connected with the investigation he could be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice or intimidation of witnesses.

Throughout the Christmas period there were other allegations made against his colleagues. He believes it was as a result of police trawling - visiting youngsters, some of them in prison, and asking them if they had any reason to complain about their time at Netherton Park.

"One man who made an allegation against me met a member of staff and explained to her that he had been hounded by the police so harshly by them that he attempted suicide, and had been in and out of a mental health hospital," he says.

"There were others who couldn't possibly have used the words they were making in written statements."

On April 16, 1998, eight months after he was suspended, Mr Johnston was arrested and later charged with five counts of child cruelty and two further counts of physical assault.

He kept busy by attending his local sports centre and doing improvement work on his house. He also familiarised himself with Newcastle Crown Court and formed a strong bond with other staff who had been accused, including Derek Gordon of Chester-le-Street, County Durham.

As the months dragged into years, and court adjournment after court adjournment followed, his lowest point came at the beginning of 2000 when his father died.

Two days later, he received a letter from Northumberland Local Education Authority offering sympathy for his loss, and making him redundant at the same time, with the closure of Netherton Park's education wing.

"I'll never forget going to the chapel of rest at Newcastle General Hospital and seeing my father, and breaking down and sobbing uncontrollably, saying I couldn't believe what these people had done to me," he says.

After his redundancy he had to find work - as a painter and behind a bar.

On January 19, 2001, a judge at Newcastle Crown Court ruled that the three-and-a-half-year delay to his trial was a breach of his human rights.

"I felt no emotion when the proceedings against me were thrown out, I was very aware that I had simply moved into the next phase of the proceedings, to secure real justice," he says.

Earlier this year, he submitted a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority citing victimisation and malicious prosecution and his case has been taken up by his MP, Alan Beith.

"Anybody who has been falsely accused is tarnished for life and will never recover as a result of it," he says bitterly. I have been left vulnerable - I still can't believe it has happened to me."