Man who sexually abuse pupil on wife’s wedding dress jailed

Simon Ball

A boarding school teacher will spend the next 12 years in confinement for sexually abusing four teenage girls.

Judge Sean Enright of Peterborough Crown Court heard how 42-year-old Simon Ball had sex with one of the girls on his wife’s wedding dress.

Ball admitted to sexually abusing a girl while he was director of music at Kimbolton School near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

Prosecutor Charles Falk told the court how Oxford-trained Ball liked the Kimbolton pupil to dress up in her ‘schoolgirl outfit and fishnets’ and photograph her, and police seized 678 indecent images that he had taken.

The court heard Ball proposed to the girl and bought her a ring, had sex with her in a cupboard in the school’s music department and in the headmaster’s guest bathroom, and asked her to go on the pill following a pregnancy scare.

Falk said the girl felt ‘robbed of her childhood’ and ‘angry’ at the school.

Ball was also found guilty of sexually abusing three girls at Giggleswick School in Settle, North Yorkshire.

In his ruling, Judge Sean Enright said “these offences were all about satisfying your fantasies. There was never anything in it for the girls”.

Ball was jailed for five years for the Kimbolton offences and seven years for the Giggleswick offences, with the jail terms to run consecutively.

The judge ordered Ball to show the police any device capable of taking a digital image on request and banned him from working with any girl under 18.

He was also banned from contacting any of his victims.