A HEADTEACHER has gone on trial accused of gross indecency with a pupil more than a decade ago.

James Bird, who worked at St Peter’s CofE Primary School, in Accrington, is accused of assaulting the young boy on ‘seven or eight occasions’ after he had been sent out of lessons for bad behaviour.

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A court heard how the 53-year-old would take the youngster, who was aged between 10 and 11 at the time of the alleged attacks, from the corridor to his office, where he would force him to perform sexual acts on him.

Bird denies four counts of gross indecency.

The alleged victim told a jury at Preston Crown Court that when he was taken into the defendant’s office at the Cartmel Avenue school for the first time, he thought he would be given lines to do as a punishment.

He said: “He used to say ‘you’re bad aren’t you?’ and ‘you have to do this, this is your punishment’.

“I just cannot get it out of my head what he has done now that I am older. It has just messed up my life.”

The man described how the first time he was told to do oral sex, he had been sent out of a lesson for being disruptive.

He told the court: “I did not know what he was going to do. Normally you get lines that you have to write.

“We went to his office. He sat down and we did talk a bit about why I was misbehaving, but we did not really talk for that long.

“That is when he said, ‘it is more serious than you think and you are going to have to take a punishment for it’. That is when he started making me do stuff.”

The man told the jury he had struggled against what Bird was doing on the first occasion.

“I said ‘no, get off me, get off me’. I was actually crying," he said.

“The second time, it was exactly the same as the first time, but after that time, when he used to say ‘do it’, I would do it because I knew it would only last a couple of minutes and then I could get out.”

In the end, the alleged abuse stopped when the boy realised he would not be sent out of lessons if he behaved well. On the last occasion, the boy said his mum had been called into school because of a serious incident.

He told the court: “My mum came in, she was not happy. I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t.

“I did not know what to say or where to start.

“She would have believed me, she knew when I was telling the truth or not, but I just did not want to tell her that I had done it because it is not right.”

The alleged victim said he had never been able to tell anybody about what had happened to him, but had ‘felt safe’ with a housemate and confided in him when he was drunk.

He added: “I have tried so many ways of dealing with it. It is just ruining everything because all the way through high school, I could not put trust in teachers or anything. I just totally messed up everything.

“I wanted to go to university and everything, but it just took over.

“There are so many bad people in this world and if people don’t step forward to stop it, they are going to get away with it. They don’t know the mess they’re doing to the people they are doing it to.”

Michael Jones, prosecuting, said when Bird was arrested, his computer and phones were seized from his home, in Acorn Close, Leyland, although no inappropriate material was found. He gave no comment answers when interviewed by officers.

The barrister continued: “This is a case of one person’s word against the other’s.”

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