School worker 'sexually abused pupil'

Rod Ryall, former housemaster, Scout leader and later director of social services at Calderdale Council, was accused of taking the boy to a youth club, a folk night and afternoon tea, then making him commit sex acts in a lay-by or down a country lane when they pulled over.

Ryall, 68, of Wheatley Drive, Mirfield, is on trial at Teesside Crown Court where he denies 10 counts of indecent assault on three alleged victims during the 1960s and 1970s.

One accuser, now in his 50s, told the jury he was taken from Newton Aycliffe Approved School, where he had been sent after being convicted of housebreaking, to a nearby youth club in Darlington.

One one occasion Ryall, an Oxford graduate, parked in a lane on the way back and forced the teenager to commit a sex act on him, the court heard.

Ryall, who was a housemaster at Aycliffe before leaving to continue his criminology doctorate at Cambridge and returned occasionally to the school as part of his studies, drove the youth to a pub for a folk night, the jury heard.

He said he was given soft drinks and was again abused on the way back, and was sexually abused when he brought Ryall his breakfast in his quarters.

Tania Griffiths QC, defending, said what he now alleged Ryall had done differed greatly from what he first told police in 2000, when his allegations did not result in prosecution, and claimed he was lying.

Police contacted him last year after another Aycliffe pupil made a complaint about Ryall, and Miss Griffiths suggested he was motivated by trying to gain compensation when detectives spoke to him last year but he denied it.

The court has heard that in 1988 Ryall pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault, two counts of gross indecency and one of serious sexual assaults on boys aged 14 to 17.