A teacher who used a fake Snapchat profile to trick girls as young as 10 to send explicit images to him has been jailed for eight years.
Simon Clark, 46, who was head of French at Alun High School in Mold, north Wales, pretended he was a 14-year-old boy to prey on 26 girls aged 10 to 15.
With the username ‘Jamie_jones6968’, he sent hundreds of messages to dozens of girls, in some cases sending them indecent videos.
Between his victims he received nearly 150 indecent images, of which 26 were in the most serious category.
Clark, a father-of-two from Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, was married at the time of the offending.
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His abuse came to light after the mother of one of his victims saw explicit messages on her 12-year-old daughter’s laptop.
Detectives traced the IP address used by ‘Jamie_jones6968’ to Clark’s home, where devices were found containing extensive records of the messages and images he exchanged with his victims.
Clark’s wife has since divorced him, and the court was told he has ‘lost everything’.
Judge Simon Berkson told the defendant he represented a “significant risk” to children.
Sentencing him on Friday, Judge Berkson said: ‘It is, of course, every parent’s worst nightmare, this sort of thing happening to their children.
‘Many of the offences involve sexual communication, some involving inciting children to engage in sexual activity. This was well planned and sophisticated criminal behaviour.
‘You clearly have a sexual interest from the sexual abuse of children and gain sexual gratification from it.’
Clark had admitted at an earlier hearing to 29 offences of child sex abuse, including one count of inciting a child under 13 to engage in penetrative sexual activity and two counts of inciting a child under 13 to engage in non-penetrative sexual activity.
They also included two counts of inciting a child under 16 to engage in non-penetrative sexual activity and 21 counts of engaging in sexual communication with a child under 16.
The remaining charges were one count of making 26 indecent images of children of Category A, one of making 29 indecent images of children of Category B and one of making 81 indecent images of children of Category C.
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