A TEACHER who was accused of raping a student while working at UCAN was left ‘anxious’ and ‘scared’ when he heard threats had allegedly been made against his life, a court was told.

The teacher, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was told an indirect threat had been made against him by Philip Day, who was later acquitted by a jury.

Day is currently on trial for stalking the teacher and UCAN headteacher Cath Green, as well as committing arson at the school last February.

A jury heard that Day had told the teacher to hand himself into the police or ‘hide’, just days before he was alleged to have made a threat to kill him via a council safeguarding officer.

The teacher received a message from Day when he was on holiday with his family, saying he was planning to ‘expose’ him for allegedly raping a student.

The jury heard that Day wrote: “If I was you I would asked for police protection. You have two options, hand yourself in to the police or hide. Your life as you know it is about to change.”

An official allegation was never made to police by the alleged victim, and the teacher was cleared of any wrongdoing by a safeguarding panel.

The teacher said in court yesterday, Wednesday: “I just broke down crying. Genuinely, my life just drained out of me and I couldn’t even read it out loud.”

Days later, the teacher was contacted by colleagues and former students alerting him to allegations being made on social media, which he passed on to the headteacher.

Less than a week after receiving the message from Day, the teacher was contacted by the headteacher and police regarding the alleged threats to his life.

He said: “I felt absolutely awful, anxious, scared. I have never been threatened, never been in a fight, so having my life threatened was something that was a major concern.”

He recalls being told that Day had access to firearms. The jury has previously heard that he had handed a shotgun to police during a firearm amnesty appeal.

The court heard that during the school summer holidays, after Day was found not guilty of making threats to kill, he began making videos regarding the allegations against the teacher, whom he eventually named.

This culminated in Day waiting outside UCAN in a van on the first day of term, and saying in a video he would wait each day until the teacher was suspended.

He said: “I saw the videos and then, for my own sanity, stopped watching them. I couldn’t keep on watching someone saying these things. I felt like I was on the run from my own life.

“Comments were being put underneath it and I felt like I was going mad, because I saw posts criticising what he was doing and I’d look again and they weren’t there.”

The teacher told jurors he didn’t want to return to work for the new term, but did so and saw the van when he arrived around 8am, recognising Day from the Facebook videos.

He said: “It seemed like everything just kept on escalating. All I could think about was ‘what is he going to do next?’ I couldn’t concentrate on anything.”

But the defence put to the teacher – who told police at the time that he wouldn’t recognise the alleged victim – that he had anticipated the allegations due to having received Facebook messages from Day and the alleged victim prior to the charges being brought.

The teacher said he did not read them until later that year.

Andrew McGuiness, asking questions on behalf of the defendant, put it to the teacher that his stress and anxiety was born out of fears that the rape allegations were ‘not going away’.

He also said that Day had told the teacher in a message that any exposure would be ‘totally legal’, and that no direct threats ever surfaced.

Day, of Saltash Close in Runcorn, also faces charges of burglary and arson at a home in Essex. He denies all charges. The trial continues.