A former teacher at a children’s home has gone on trial accused of sexual abuse.

Michael Curran, from Ingleby Barwick, is accused along with two other men of abusing pupils at St William’s - an approved school for boys with behavioural problems in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire.

The residential home and school was run by the Catholic De La Salle order.

Former principal James Carragher, 75, is one of the two other men on trial at Leeds Crown Court.

He has already been jailed for 21 years for sexually abusing boys in his care has gone on trial accused of further offences.

A jury has been told that was jailed for seven years in 1993 and a further 14 years in 2004 for offences he committed

Carragher who was head and principal of St William’s from 1976 to 1990.

Opening the case for the prosecution, Richard Wright QC said Carragher was a man who had a “committed sexual interest in children and young boys in particular”.

Mr Wright said: “He hid behind a cloak of respectability.”

The prosecutor described how boys were sent to St William’s when they were taken away from their families because they had got into trouble and were often fragile and vulnerable.

He said many staff members were dedicated and professional but he added: “Amongst the staff were bullies and paedophiles who used violence as a means of controlling the boys and who took the opportunity of working in that environment to use and abuse boys in their care for their own sexual gratification.”

Mr Wright said the boys at St William’s were regularly beaten, sexually abused and raped in the 1970s and 1980s.

He told the jury of six men and six women that the abusers were “effectively immune from complaints”.

“Who would believe the word of a delinquent boy set against those of a respected teacher of a Catholic order,” Mr Wright said.

Carragher went on trial along with former chaplain at St William’s, Anthony McCallen, 69, and a former teacher Michael Curran, 62

The jury was told how McCallen was convicted of abusing two boys in the 1990s when he was also found in possession of indecent photographs of boys, some of which he took through spyholes as they showered and used the toilet.

Mr Wright told the jury how, during more recent investigations, police found photographs of boys hidden between the pages of McCallen’s books which “when viewed together establish in the clearest terms where his sexual interest lies”.

Curran has no previous convictions, the prosecutor said.

Carragher, of Cearns Road, Prenton, Merseyside, denies 50 counts of indecent assault and 12 other serious sexual offences. McCallen, of St John’s House, Ecclestone, Merseyside, denies 18 indecent assaults and seven other serious sexual offences.

Curran, of Whernside Crescent, Ingleby Barwick, denies one count of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and another of indecent assault.

The trial continues.