AN acclaimed headteacher on trial for sexually assaulting two boys has tearfully told a court: "If this is found to be true, it's very, very serious."

Anne Lakey, 55, wept as she explained how an email to her school from one of her accusers which described her as "a sexual monster" had been "malicious".

Giving evidence at Teesside Crown Court, the married mother-of-one told how she has been suspended from her role as chief executive of two secondary schools.

Mrs Lakey spent 90 minutes answering questions from her barrister, Tim Roberts, QC, before being cross-examined by prosecutor Caroline Goodwin.

When discrepancies between her evidence and police interviews were highlighted, she said: "I answered truthfully and honestly in what was a stressful situation."

Mrs Lakey, of Oxhill Villas, Stanley, County Durham, taught RE and history at a Sunderland school at the time of the alleged offences in the 1980s.

She has since become a nationally-heralded head, and was the chief executive of a consortium of County Durham schools when the claims came to light.

The jury of seven men and five women heard that she was described as a visionary for her work at Fynedoune Community College in Sacriston, near Durham.

When what she described as "the awful, malicious and untrue" email was received by bosses in December 2012, she said she was "devastated" and "totally shocked".

Mrs Lakey denies a total of 13 counts of indecent assault over a three-year period - on one complainant aged 13 or 14, and another boy aged 15.

The older lad said he lost his virginity with her on a camping trip, and the younger boy said they had sex after she allowed him to watch her in the bath.

She is accused of repeatedly having sexual relations with the teenagers at separate times at her home while her then husband was away on business.

Mrs Lakey told police she did not have sex with the first boy and only had a relationship with the older one when he was 18, and she was in her early-30s.

The jury heard how the time of the alleged offences, she taught at Sandhill View School, Sunderland, and went on to teach at Farringdon, also Sunderland.

Later, she taught at Burnside in Wallsend, North Tyneside, before moving to Deerness Valley School, which later joined with another to form the Durham Federation.

The court heard her first job after studying at Sheffield University was teaching in Mansfield, then Huddersfield before she moved with her then husband Eamonn Toland back to her native North-East.

After the email was sent to her school by the first complainant, she contacted the one she accepts having sex with, to tell him he had been named on it.

She denied accusations from Miss Goodwin that calling him was "quite a deliberate attempt by you to head him off at the pass" and get him to stay quiet.

Miss Goodwin said: "This had the potential to ruin your career within education, didn't it?" Mrs Lakey replied: "If this was found to be true, it's very very serious."

In an earlier exchange with the prosecutor, she said: "It was a bad email, an email that was untrue. I got a total shock. It was malicious. It was awful."