A Liverpool headteacher has been jailed for taking an indecent image of a child.
Matthew Hargreaves was serving as principal of King’s Northway Primary Academy in Wavertree before his arrest in June this year on the charge.
The 48-year-old, formerly of Halewood, had also downloaded hundreds of category A, B and C indecent images of children during a five-year period
Hargreaves initially denied the charge of taking a Category C image of a child before changing his plea to guilty at Liverpool Crown Court last month.
The court heard that the disgraced teacher had initially told police that he had found the depraved images accidentally while browsing swingers websites.
However analysis seized from Hargreaves’ home by detectives found he had downloaded 12 category A images, the most serious form of child abuse.
A further eight files containing category B material and 214 of category C images were also uncovered alongside the image taken of a school-age girl.
Hargreaves was sentenced on Friday (October 23) to two years and one month in prison while receiving a 10-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
He is also required to register on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years.
Judge Simon Medland KC said: “Until these matters came to light, you presented to the outside world as an intelligent, publicly spirited, family man.
“You misused that intelligence to secretly satisfy yourself sexually.
“To the children and parents of your school, where you were in a leadership role, you presented yourself outwardly as a good man and a positive influence.
“Behind that, however, you had a deeply ingrained sexual perversion, seeing children as sexual objects.
“For some five years or so before your arrest, you had been in the habit of using adult sexual chatrooms.
“During the course of that, you developed an interest in fantasy, sexualised chats about children and in downloading illegal pornographic imagery of them.
“You, above all people, must surely know that children are entitled to their childhood. They are children, not adults. They are not sexual objects.”