A care home manager in West Yorkshire isolated and sexually abused vulnerable and “unwanted” children using his “unfettered access” to them over a period of almost two decades, a court has heard.

Malcolm Phillips, 92, is accused of “using children for his sexual gratification” at Skircoat Lodge care home in Halifax between 1976 and 1994.

His assistant of 16 years, Linda Brunning, 66, is accused of helping him abuse children at the home and indecently assaulting one boy herself.

A trial for Brunning, and a trial of facts for Phillips, who has been deemed unfit to stand trial, opened on Monday at Bradford crown court.

Michelle Colborne KC, prosecuting, said Phillips was the manager from when Skircoat Lodge opened in 1976 as a residential temporary home for children who were the subject of care orders.

Colborne said children at the home were vulnerable, many having suffered previous physical or sexual abuse. Some, she told jurors, were “simply unwanted, marked as troublemakers in the system”.

Jurors heard how female complainants, who were told to wear nighties for bed, described Phillips coming into their bedrooms at night and indecently assaulting them.

She said Phillips lived in a flat leading to the girls’ bedrooms, which gave him “unfettered access”.

Colborne told jurors: “During the course of almost two decades Malcolm Phillips used his power to isolate specific children to use for his sexual gratification, and he wasn’t the only one.”

The court heard Brunning was also “adept at isolating and manipulating children”.

Colborne said Brunning was a “large and domineering woman who took pleasure in humiliating children” and “facilitated sexual assaults by Malcolm Phillips on a small, defenceless child”.

The prosecutor said the children “were chosen carefully by the defendants”, who had access to their files and “knew which children could be manipulated”.

“They chose them carefully, they told them no one cared about them, they told them no one would believe them,” Colborne said.

Jurors heard Phillips and Brunning would threaten to withhold the children’s pocket money, or told them their family visits would be taken away.

Colborne said: “If they ran away from Skircoat Lodge they were taken straight back by police, accused of being troublemakers.”

The court heard that one complainant, who was sent to Skircoat Lodge as a teenager in the late 1970s, remembered that girls were told to “wear nighties to bed”.

“While in bed, while the lights were out, she would hear Phillips enter the bedroom, he would approach her bed and touch her under her nightie”, Colborne said.

Colborne said a second complainant, who was 10 years old at the time, accused Phillips of sexually assaulting her on at least 10 occasions while she was in bed.

The court heard Phillips “seemed to have taken her under his wing and referred to her as one of his special girls”.

Phillips, of Tyseley, Birmingham, is charged with three counts of indecent assault, two counts of indecency with a child, three counts of indecent assault on a male person, two counts of buggery and two of rape.

Brunning, of Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax, is charged with one count of indecent assault on a male person, two counts of aiding and abetting indecent assault and two of aiding and abetting buggery.

The trial continues.