A drama teacher was jailed yesterday for seducing a vulnerable teenage girl who turned to her for help.
Caroline French, 38, groomed the pupil by encouraging her to confide all her troubles in her and exchange texts and emails.
By the age of 14, the youngster would spend the night at the form tutor’s house, where they drank lager and smoked.
When she was 15 the relationship became sexual and the pupil was made to wear an engagement ring on her finger.
Yesterday the teacher was sentenced to three years behind bars and disqualified for life from working with youngsters after being convicted of indecency with a child.
Preston Crown Court heard that French, who taught at a high school in Lancashire, gave the pupil her phone number in 2003 so they could talk about problems the girl was having at home.
French would often give the girl a lift and offered sleepovers at her home when she had trouble with her mother.
After the relationship turned physical, the pair had a three-month relationship between January and April 2004.
The girl, now 22, told the jury: ‘No other teachers were like her. We could talk to her.’
She told how she had become stressed about her GCSEs and French listened to her problems.
But she began to feel ‘trapped’ by the relationship, and it soured when she began a casual, experimental relationship with a girl her age.
French accused the girl of giving her a sexually transmitted infection and warned she would be in trouble for passing it on.
It was not until 2009 that the relationship came to light, when the woman was approached by police investigating another of French’s affairs.
Police had discovered she had moved another pupil, who was aged 16, into her home near Lytham St Anne’s.
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The second girl was said to have had a three-year sexual relationship with the teacher and gone through a civil marriage ceremony.
French, now of Darlington, denied one count of indecency with a child and three counts of indecent assault on a child.
She told the jury that the first girl ‘is lying because I turned her down and told her to get lost’.
She added: ‘You can’t help but care about students in your care, especially if you’re a form tutor and you see them every day for five years. She had family problems. I didn’t exploit her, I tried to help her.’
Judge Stuart Baker told her: ‘You have shown yourself to be a well-respected teacher on one hand, but on the other, manipulative and selfish when it suits you.
‘This is what I regard as a relationship that started mutually and ended abusively.
‘By accusing all of the witnesses that gave evidence of lying you have shown no remorse for what you have done.’
