Teacher ‘filmed children in shower cubicles’

York Crown Court

Published on 13/12/2012 11:55

A teacher from North Yorkshire has appeared in court charged with secretly filming young children as they undressed in shower cubicles and dormitories.

Simon Mark Knowles, 52, faces 11 charges of voyeurism in Harrogate, dating back to 2009.

Knowles is charged with creating films, typically lasting no more than three minutes, of children showering or getting dressed and undressed after swimming, at various locations in Harrogate.

Knowles is also charged with 13 counts of making and distributing images of children being abused, including some of children as young as three.

A second man, Martin Kenneth Almond, 48, of Carnot Street, off Leeman Road, in York, also faces six linked charges of creating indecent images of children. Both appeared before York magistrates this week.

Knowles, formerly of Bridlington and now of Haighfield Caravan Park in Leeds, wore a smart grey suit and spoke only to confirm his name, age and address at the preliminary hearing this week. No plea was entered.

Martin Butterworth, for the prosecution, said the images range from one to five on the Copine Scale, used to measure the seriousness of images of children, with five being the most serious grade.

He said: “He has actually used covert cameras to capture school children getting changed for PE.”

Knowles was told the crimes were too serious to be dealt with at a magistrates’ court and that it would be referred to crown court.

He is expected to appear before magistrates in York again in February for committal to crown court.

He was granted bail with a number of conditions, including being forbidden to have unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 18.

Almond’s case was adjourned for one week.

The school cannot be named for legal reasons.

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Teacher ‘filmed children in shower cubicles’

Top stories

News