A TEACHER persuaded people in several countries to sexually abuse children in their care  - and also tricked students into taking indecent images of themselves.

Richard Clark, 29, from Topcliffe Road in Sowerby near Thirsk, used fake digital accounts posing as a teenage girl or boy and contacted people in the UK and abroad, inciting them to abuse their siblings, children or grandchildren and record it for his own gratification.

In at least one case, the infant was so young their nappy could be seen in the photograph.

He also used fake social media accounts to again pose as a teenage girl or boy and contacted boys, persuading them to send indecent images of themselves to him.

In some cases he used the names of real students to lure the teenagers into thinking they were being contacted by a girl they knew. The school cannot be named for legal reasons.

Clark appeared at York Crown Court yesterday, where he pleaded guilty to 18 offences committed in 2016, mostly relating to encouraging sexual acts to be committed against children and inciting children to engage in sexual activity. He had previously admitted eight offences, making a total of 26 guilty pleas. 

He also asked for 54 other offences to be taken into consideration.

The court heard he had initially been arrested and bailed by Cleveland Police on April 25 this year for several initial offences, but while on bail they discovered some of his more extreme pornographic images and revisited him. The case was passed on to North Yorkshire Police who set up a major incident investigation and arrested him on April 26.

Police had first gone to his address at Stockton, where his mother and brother still lived. While officers made their way to the school where he taught to arrest him, his mother warned her son and he uninstalled his Snapchat apps on his phone along with a teenage dating app.

Dressed in a red T-shirt, he looked down at the floor while his crimes were described to the court.

The scale of his offending was so vast that North Yorkshire Police had to issue 79 Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) packages to other police forces nationally and internationally to alert them to the child victims which appeared in the videos and photographs. So far, 17 children have been removed from their homes or safeguarded.

Prosecutor Tom Storey told Judge Andrew Stubbs QC that there could be many more victims as investigators had identified 369 occasions where the defendant had contacted people online who had care of children and incited them to sexually abuse those children, or enable access to them.

Mr Storey told the court that in July 2016 he contacted a man in the US, under the fake name “Jenny Robinson” who had children aged five, eight and two and encouraged him to commit sex acts against them. At one point tried to persuade him to rape his oldest son but there was no indication this happened.

Between July and December 2016 he contacted a 17-year-old boy in Nepal and tried to persuade him to rape his 14-year-old sister.

He requested indecent images of another man’s four-year-old daughter and on December 24, 2016 contacted a 38-year-old man in California with two children aged eight and six and asked him to send indecent images of them. The man he contacted offered to get his children to touch him sexually.

The headteacher of a school he targeted provided a witness impact statement to the case, in which he described his “shock and disgust” at the trusted teacher’s actions, which he said had caused “anger and frustration in the community” and left some students “distraught”.

He said the school had employed school nurses, psychologists and counsellors to deal with the impact of Clark’s actions on students and teachers, but he feared some students would never recover from their ordeal. Others were likely to miss out on opportunities to go to high-ranking universities because of the emotional and mental ordeal they experienced prior to their exams.

In the statement read out to court, the headteacher said: “No-one in the school has been left untouched by Clark’s actions.”

A witness statement was also read to the court from the mother of one of the students he had tricked into sending indecent images to, by posing as a teenage girl.

She described the impact on her son, saying he had been an out-going boy who loved socialising with his friends, but was now “clingy and doesn’t want to go out”, adding he now “lies in our bed until he falls asleep” and is unable to trust male teachers.

She said: “He feels vulnerable and ashamed, thinking he was exchanging images with a young girl.”

Defending, Mark Partridge said: “He knows the only option to the court is a substantial period in prison. His first words to police when arrested were, “I need help”. He’s under no illusion that the court will find him a substantial risk to the public.”

He said the only real mitigation in the case was his previous lack of convictions.

Judge Andrew Stubbs QC adjourned the case until tomorrow morning, when he will return his sentence.