April 2004 Man who abused schoolgirls jailed A convicted criminal who indecently assaulted two eight-year-old girls while carrying out community service at a school has been jailed for two years. Andrew Marsh committed the offences working unsupervised as a classroom assistant at a school in Ashford, Kent. The 44-year-old of Bybrook Road, Ashford, was jailed for two years on Friday at Maidstone Crown Court. He had previously been cleared of similar allegations against three other girls and had denied all the charges. Marsh was given the job after receiving a 200-hour community service order for fraud in October 2002. The court heard the school was aware of his conviction and employed him to hold reading classes in a school corridor. The trial heard a girl at the school told her mother in April 2003 that Marsh had touched her over her clothes and five other girls came forward with similar accusations in the following weeks. He denied all the charges against him but was convicted of indecently assaulting two eight-year-old girls. Judge Warrick McKinnon told Marsh he would serve half of his two year sentence in jail and would be placed on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years. ‘Just unbelievable’ The judge said he accepted the assaults were not “aggravated sexual molestation” but that the incidents “must have been very uncomfortable for these two little girls”. Outside court one of the girls’ mothers said: “No one who has any criminal conviction for whatever offence should be allowed to work unsupervised in a school. “It is just unbelievable. His sentence is disgusting. “He should have got life for what he did to my little girl.” A Kent County Council (KCC) spokeswoman said: “Andrew Marsh was assessed by the Kent Probation Service as being a low risk offender as his previous offences related to deception and fraud crimes. “However KCC has for some time been working with Kent Probation Service and new guidelines have been drawn up to ensure cases like this one never happen again.”