A teacher left paralysed after breaking his neck in a freak welly-wanging accident has lost his £5m damages claim against an adventure centre.

Glennroy Blair-Ford had survived a week of outdoor activities with his secondary school charges on Dartmoor in April 2007 when he took part in a "Mini Olympics" event on the final night.

One of the games involved children and adults throwing Wellington boots as far as they could, with the teachers handicapped by having to throw backwards through their legs.

But tragedy struck when the 45-year-old former head of design and technology at Wilmington Enterprise College, Dartford, swung his boot and was propelled head first to the ground.

Mr Blair-Ford, then of Bromley, was catastrophically injured, fracturing his neck, and will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

He is unable to move his body below the neck and now lives in a residential nursing facility several miles away from his family’s home on a leafy private estate in Bromley.

The devoted Christian, who has published many articles and delivered lectures on his faith, sued the CRS Adventures Limited centre where he was injured.

The teacher, who was only 40 at the time, had treatment at hospitals in Torbay, Plymouth and Sheffield before he was able to settle at the nursing home in south London.

He requires ventilator support 23 hours per day and is dependent on others for all aspects of day-to-day life, although he continued after the accident to participate in Bible classes by means of special software.

His lawyers were asking for a compensation package worth more than £5 million to fund the full-time care he will need for the rest of his life.

The judge rejected the claim that CRS was liable and ruled there was "no foreseeable real risk" of injury from welly-wanging.