Girl killed after school coach takes wrong turn

A school coach crashed on a French motorway yesterday, killing a 15-year-old Scottish girl and seriously injuring nine other people when its driver took a wrong turn.

French police said they believed that the coach, carrying a party from Largs Academy in Ayrshire, had mistakenly turned on to a slip road off the A6 near Bierre-les-Semur in Burgundy.

They said the driver appeared to have braked when he realised his error. The coach, carrying 43 children on a school trip to Barcelona, had swerved on to the verge and tipped over on to its left side. No other vehicles were involved in the crash, just after 5am local time.

Katherine Fish, 15, from Largs, was killed. Four teenage girls, two teenage boys and three teachers were seriously injured. Fifteen other passengers had minor injuries.

George Maxwell, the headteacher of the school, said: "Katherine was a lovely girl ... such a loss." He had broken the news to other pupils at morning assembly. "I spoke about the need to help each other out today, because I knew it was going to be our worst ever day at Largs Academy. They were quite shocked and very upset, but they took it well and they've been very resilient."

The names of the injured pupils were not immediately released, but the teachers were named as Alan Sturrock, a physical education teacher, 43; David Macluskey, an English teacher, 34; and Janet Gray, 50, a history teacher. Mr Macluskey was reported to have lost an arm.

The school party had travelled overnight from Scotland, with two drivers aboard the coach, owned by Allan's coaches of Gorebridge, Edinburgh. The children were on a week-long trip to Barcelona, which was to include visits to a theme park and to the Picasso Museum as well as bowling and go-karting evenings.

Arrangements were being made yesterday to fly home the unharmed and those with minor injuries. Parents of the more seriously injured children were being flown to France.

The managing director of Allan's coaches, David Allan, said: "This has come as a complete and utter shock. There is nothing else I can say at the moment." French police were interviewing the two drivers of the coach and uninjured passengers to try to discover how the accident had happened. The coach operator said the vehicle was only a year old and the driver had held his public service vehicle licence for eight years.

Murielle Dupont, an English teacher at a school near the crash scene, who went to comfort the pupils, said: "They were all sleeping. They were woken by the noise and broken glass." The survivors, many of them barefoot, were taken to a village hall near by.

Several children immediately telephoned their parents on their mobile phones to tell them what had happened. Police said the evidence they had received, including eyewitness reports by other road users, suggested that the driver had put on the brakes after taking a wrong turning into a slip road. The vehicle had then swerved and turned over after hitting the verge or, possibly, a crash barrier.