Last updated at 17:14 27 April 2007

A teacher accused of having an affair with a teenage pupil has told a court that she loved him.

Jenine Saville-King, 29, told the jury she "really cared" for the boy and when questioned admitted the depth of her feelings.

The teacher, from Hook, Hampshire, denies engaging in sexual activity with the boy while she was teaching at a school in Watford, Herts.

Prosecutors say Saville-King was involved with the boy for more than a year, from 2004 to 2005 when the boy was aged 15 and 16.

Asked if she was in love with him she said: "No, I didn't love him." But under further questioning she replied: "Yeah, I think maybe I did."

It is also alleged that the affair continued after Saville-King became pregnant by her husband Paul, 37, a manager with an engineering firm, and after both she and the boy had left the school.

Saville-King denies sexual activity with a child and breach of trust.

She said she began seeing the boy every day - at break times, lunchtimes and at an after-school study group - when they would talk about "things apart from school".

She said she was "pleased" he had singled her out.

"He was confident, very popular, liked to have a bit of a joke, needed to be around people," she told jurors.

Saville-King said she first met the boy outside school in October 2004.

"He didn't feel I had enough time at school to help him with what he needed help with," said Saville-King.

"I liked him and I wanted to help him. I felt a bit sorry for him."

She said she picked the boy up and they sat in her car outside a local pub looking at his schoolwork.

Slim Saville-King, 29, told the jury: "He was a comfort to me, he made me laugh. He was nice to me and I liked the attention.

"He would say nice things about me, that I was pretty, that I made him happy and I was funny."

She said as the relationship developed she found herself unable to tell her husband, Paul, an operations managing for an engineering firm, about the relationship with the boy.

"I couldn't tell him because I was scared at way he would have reacted. I knew how bad it looked and I would have destroyed his dream of an MBA - he was heading towards a distinction," she said.

The mother-of-two who now lives with her family in Hook, Hampshire was giving evidence at St Albans Crown Court, where she pleaded not guilty to seven charges of sexual activity with a child and one offence of abuse of trust.

The prosecution claim that after going to work as a teaching assistant at the boy's school she began an affair with him during the summer term when he was 15 years old.

The affair is said to have lasted for more than a year ending when he was almost 17.

It was claimed the pair enjoyed sex romps at her home in St Albans where she was living at the time, when her husband was working in London.

Giving evidence the teenager, who is now 18 years old, told the jury that shortly after he was 16, he and the teacher began having full sex regularly.

Sex sessions, he said, took place at her home and there were even occasions when they checked into hotels to spend the night together.

The jury also heard evidence how the pair emailed one another, used MSN to chat and would text one another.

Rumours about the relationship began to circulate around the school and in September 2005 staff were made aware of a photograph of the two them that had been found by another girl pupil on the boy's MSN site.

The picture showed the two posing intimately cheek-to-cheek. The school launched an internal investigation and in February 2006 Mrs Saville-King was arrested at her then home in Puddingstone Drive, St Albans.

Giving evidence Mrs Saville-King told her barrister, Miss Sarah Forshaw that she is still married to her husband who she said was supporting her.

She told the jury that before going to work at the school, she was suffering from bulimia and she and her husband were having difficulties as they tried for a baby.

The wife said she underwent surgery to help her conceive and she was seeing a psychologist for her eating disorder.

She said she was taken on at the school as a teaching assistant to work with children with learning difficulties but within a short space of time she was promoted to assistant year leader for Year 10, dealing with youngsters aged 14 and 15.

Mrs Saville-King said she was given no training and found the job difficult. In addition she was also give a mentor's role in the school.

Eventually she said she found herself mentor to the boy who is at the centre of the allegations.

Mrs Saville-King said the teenager's claims that they had begun meeting up outside school before the summer holidays were untrue.

She said their relationship began in September 2004 when the boy went into Year 11 and they began sending text messages to one another.

Asked why she had become his mentor she replied: "I just wanted to help him with his course work. He was behind and needed to catch up, I was helping him to do that."

She said they would see each other at school break times, during the lunch hour and after school in the study club.

Miss Forshaw asked "Did it occur to you that you were seeing rather a lot of him?" She said: "I didn't really think about it."

Mrs Saville-King said the boy's then girlfriend - a pupil at the school - would also confide in her about her relationship with the teenager.

"She told me she had lost her virginity to him and she told me where they had sex and things like that. I hoped she was being careful and using contraceptives."

Miss Forshaw asked her: "Did you feel any jealousy?". Saville-King replied: "No". Miss Forshaw asked: "Was it ever a sexual relationship that you had with him?". She again replied: "No".

She then told the jury how she agreed to meet the boy out of school to help him with his course work.

"He felt I didn't have enough time at school to help him," she told the court.

As a result she said in October 2004 she picked him up in her car from outside his grandmother's home and drove him to a pub car park where he balanced school books on his knees in the vehicle and did some work.

She admitted she found it easy to talk to the schoolboy and they would talk about their families.

Miss Forshaw then asked her: "The boy suggests that before he was 16 you were kissing each other, indulging in mutual masturbation and mutual sex is that true?"

She replied: "No, that's not true".

She said in September of 2004 she found herself expecting her husband's baby.

At the start of term in January 2005 Saville-King said she was doing nothing to keep the boy at "arms length".

Asked how it had got to the situation where she as a 26-year-old woman was sending messages to a 16 year old boy that she was missing him, she replied: "I can't answer that question, I don't know. Whatever I needed, he made me feel okay.

"I was fond of him and he was a comfort to me."

Reminded that the boy had claimed in his evidence that by this time they were meeting two or three times a week for sex sessions she said it was "untrur".

Saville-King said: "He wanted it to be a proper relationship. that's what he wanted for me to leave Paul and for us to be together."

The trial continues.