A teaching assistant at a Broadstairs special school has been banned from being alone with teenagers after he was caught looking for illegal images while at work.

Jack Shaw, 33, claimed he was testing the school's Internet security system by using his mobile phone to hunt for pictures of young teens.

But police raided his home in Osborne Road, Broadstairs, and discovered he had been downloading vile sex images of children as young as eight.

Judge Simon James heard how university-educated Shaw had more than 170 sex images on his two laptops at home, including some at the very worst levels.

Shaw pleaded guilty to three charges of downloading the images when he appeared at Canterbury Crown Court, which he got while his partner was asleep.

The sex offender was given a 12 month jail sentence suspended for two years and ordered to undergo a programme aimed at tackling his predilection for child sex images.

The judge told him: “If it wasn’t for people like you with an appetite for this sort of imagery there would be little incentive for sort of extreme abuse of children that were depicted in some of the images found in your possession.

“People like you have a direct responsibility for the exploitation and abuse which right-minded people look to the courts for protection young people.”

He told Shaw, who has since been sacked from his post, that he rejected any claim that he was accessing child sex images while at work for research purposes on Internet security.

The judge said Shaw had used the images for his own sexual gratification while at home – images which included children involved in sex acts with adults.

He was ordered to sign the sex offenders register for 10 years and told he was not allowed to be alone with children without proper supervision.

Phil Rowley, defending, said that since his arrest, father-of-one Shaw had sought treatment for his sex problems.