In late November last year detectives charged the former teacher who was the subject of the claims with three charges of buggery and two of indecent assault. The South Australian man, 83, faced Armidale Local Court earlier this month over allegations he raped two young boarders at the school between 1964 and 1967. The revelations come days after the school erased web pages dedicated to a celebrated former teacher who died in 2016 after facing questions over claims he physically and sexually abused boys in his care. The Sun-Herald has withheld the charged former staff member's name as it could identify the alleged victims, whose names were mentioned by late headmaster Murray Guest to a group of the former pupils' contemporaries last year. In late 2019 another former student came forward with allegations of abuse against the former teacher, prompting Mr Guest to name both alleged victims to alumni who went to the school in the 1960s and '70s to encourage others with information about past abuse to come forward.

His response last year differed to the one the school originally provided to three former pupils who met with Mr Guest and the school board's deputy chair, Rob Busby, in 2014. At that meeting the former pupils claimed one of them had been raped by the man and asked for an open letter to be sent to the school community appealing for abuse survivors to come forward. Alternatively, they asked for something to be placed in the school newsletter, Binghi, about the meeting. Late headmaster Murray Guest. Credit:The Armidale School In an email circulated to the attendees the following month, Mr Busby said Mr Guest was not "keen on this idea" because the majority of "innocent" people who read Binghi were not aware of the problems the men raised and could question whether the school was "under pressure in this area". He said there was also a risk the school "could find itself in the media" during the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, which ran from 2013-17.

"A statement such as we discussed would look very 'lame' in these circumstances," he wrote. The meeting took place months before the boarding school became involved in a separate high-profile sex scandal involving a house mistress and several of its male students. The woman, in her 20s, received a suspended jail sentence in 2018. In a June 2015 email Mr Guest wrote that he knew of three schools - Geelong Grammar, Newington College and St Ignatius ' College Riverview - who had written open letters asking for victims to come forward, but all were related to "specific high level legal matters". "I am not aware of any school that has written such a letter as a fishing expedition and I cannot see good sense in that," he said. In a November 2018 letter to one of the men at the meeting, Mr Guest and school board chairman Sebastian Hempel said those schools calling for past victims to come forward "possessed clear evidence of wide scale abuse".

But a month later Mr Guest urged past students to come forward after sexual assault charges were laid against Jacob Charles Woods, in his 30s, a former TAS housemaster accused of raping an 11-year-old boy at the school in 2001. Loading Mr Lawless said Armidale Anglican Bishop Rick Lewers supported the ex-pupils' efforts to be heard by the school board. "We were grateful for his support and indeed were more so when Murray Guest did come on board with his," he said. Last year the school committed to joining the National Redress Scheme, which provides compensation and access to counselling for survivors of institutional sexual abuse, and created a garden "reflection space" to acknowledge past incidents of sexual abuse.