A SCHOOL missed an opportunity to stop a paedophile grooming pupils 30 years ago, because staff did not believe the victims.

Ronald Aldridge, 65, was yesterday jailed for nine years for a single count of raping a 15-year-old in a crime that left her “devastated”.

But she was not the only victim, as the Bushey Heath resident pursued consensual sexual relations with a number of other underage girls, Harrow Crown Court heard.

Several pupils reported Aldridge at the time, but staff at the school, which cannot be named for legal reasons, dismissed the allegations.

He was handed a nine-year sentence by Judge Stephen Holt at Harrow Crown Court yesterday, and will serve two-thirds of his sentence in prison.

DC Ian Knight, of the Met's child abuse investigation team, said: “There were a number of girls that had been groomed and went on to have a relationship with him.

“It came out in trial that there were these girls that reported him and that they weren't believed.”

He added: “My view is that had the school believed these girls he could have been stopped earlier. We will never know.”

In a statement released to the Harrow Times, the victim thanked family, friends, prosecution witnesses and police for their “unwavering support”.

She said: “Without the selfless encouragement and care of me by many decent, honourable people, Ronald Aldridge's name would not now be on the Sex Offenders Register where it belongs, where it should have been since December 1982.

“I should have been safe at school.”

Aldridge left love letters for the 15-year-old, who is not one of the girls who reported him, in her locker.

They were presented as evidence in court, alongside the diary she kept at the time, which describes how he groomed her for sex.

He raped her on one single occasion and she says he “chased her around” the school in the weeks that followed, pursuing a consensual sexual relationship with her in which she would disappear at lunch to have intercourse with him.

She went from being a happy, popular, intelligent and outgoing teenager to an introverted, unhappy and underachieving pupil who was rapidly losing friends.

She says the impact lasted throughout her adult life and she is still left without the qualifications she would have received had it not been for his abuse.

DC Knight said: “She became separated from her peers at school. She was in a position where she felt she couldn't let anything come out because of the embarrassment to her family and the school and everyone really.

“I suppose she felt trapped.”