Four years' jail for sex pervert teacher

Nigel Jackson, 48, sent the girl, in Northern Ireland, a series of explicit e-mails, pictures, and mobile phone text messages. During part of that time, he worked as a supply teacher at Littlehampton Community School, in June, 2004.

Jackson, who also taught at Durrington High School, Worthing, befriended the girl, who cannot be identified, and gained her trust by pretending to be a 15-year-old schoolboy called "Pete Jones".

The case became public in January amid major controversy over vetting of teachers and other school staff.

It emerged that Jackson had been reported to the Department for Education and Science after he quit as deputy head of a school in Seaford, East Sussex, over allegations of "grooming" another 14-year-old girl over the internet.

In spite of those concerns, Jackson was able to work for four separate days at the Littlehampton school, because checks by the teaching agency supplying him revealed no problems.

Littlehampton head Jayne Wilson said in January her confidence in the vetting system had been shaken and added Jackson's time at the school had been "four days too many".

Last week Londonderry Crown Court heard that Jackson and the Ulster girl exchanged e-mails for nine months until he arranged to meet her, where she lives in Derry, on January 22 last year and indecently assaulted her.

In April last year, the teenager received phone calls from Jackson's wife and son, who told her his true identity.

She refused to believe them but told suspicious friends, who alerted schoolteachers, and they passed information on the police.

Jackson was arrested in England on April 22, 2005.

Officers seized his mobile phone and computer to carry out forensic examinations.

He was charged and released on bail but re-arrested when he twice breached his bail conditions by e-mailing the victim and being caught by police on CCTV walking along Brighton seafront with a girl from Durrington High.

He admitted meeting a child after sexual grooming on the internet and indecently assaulting her and twice inciting her to commit an act of gross indecency from March, 2004, to April the following year.

Judge Corinne Philpott told the court Jackson '“ a family man with a hitherto exemplary criminal and professional record '“ always had "an unhealthy interest in pre-pubescent girls".

She said the teacher "became obsessed" with internet chatrooms when his own teenage children started using them.

Judge Philpott said it gave him a platform to "reinvent himself" as the fictitious schoolboy.

She warned young people and their parents over the dangers of paedophiles lurking behind false identities in popular internet chatrooms.

"If this case is about anything, it is about the danger of chatrooms. Many young people go into their bedroom, close the door and go on to a chatroom. They talk to their friends on chatrooms, on mobiles and by texts and on the internet.

It is a culture we have, and we have to deal with it. Every effort must be made to protect young people who choose to use this form of technology."

The victim had been left "devastated" to discover "Pete's" real identity and felt "foolish and guilty," added Judge Philpott.

Eilis MacDermott, defending, said: "He derives emotional satisfaction from posing as a teenage boy and doing things that teenage boys might do."

Jackson was ordered to sign the Sex Offenders' Register, and was told to undertake a prison sex offenders' treatment programme, despite Probation Service recommendations that he was unsuitable for it.