Saturday 2 February 2019

IICSA - Inadequate Inquiry into Child Sex abuse

This is a copy of a tweet stream I've just published.

IICSA last Friday published the schedule for the hearing into Ealing Abbey and St Benedict’s School next week. I’m going to explain why they deserve the name “Inadequate Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse”.

First, the hearing is only a week long. Lawyers for survivors argued months ago that a week would not be long enough for this hearing. Now you’re going to see why.

This is the second hearing of the inquiry’s case study into abuse at Benedictine monasteries and their attached schools. The first hearing was in November & December 2017, looking into abuse at Ampleforth and Downside. It lasted 3 weeks.

Despite the length, the hearing ran out of time before they could hear witnesses for the organisations responsible for inspecting and regulating the schools: respectively the Independent Schools’ Inspectorate and the Department for Education.

So one would reasonably expect that they would schedule a later hearing to hear these missing witnesses. They didn’t.  Given that, one might expect that they would find time to address the issues of inspection and regulation this week. They haven’t.

They have somewhat belatedly discovered what we knew all along, that a week isn’t enough, so witnesses from ISI and DfE aren’t even scheduled to be heard at all this week.

For one hearing to run out of time is understandable (if careless), but for them to give up altogether on the subject for the second is unbelievable.

Because I’m a core participant in the inquiry, I have lawyers for this (shared with a number of survivors). They have complained bitterly to the inquiry about this. But we’ve had no assurances from the inquiry as to when (if ever) we will get ISI and DfE giving evidence.

Also, Ealing Abbey commissioned a number of its own inquiries into abuse, most notably from Lord Carlile. His investigation is actually mentioned by name in the scope of this case study! But he’s not being called and neither are any of authors of the other reviews.

Why is this important and unacceptable? In describing this I have to tread carefully. I’m not allowed to disclose ahead of time any documents that will be used in evidence next week, so what I’m going to say next is all based on stuff already in the public domain.

In a hearing last year about abuse in the Church of England, the inquiry got very irate when someone leaked a letter from Prince Charles about Bishop Peter Ball, a letter that IICSA themselves where going to publish a few days later.

I’ve discussed the inquiry’s excessive secrecy over documents with senior officials. They claim its like a trial, you mustn’t influence the jury ahead of time with a public debate about the evidence. But this doesn’t wash for two reasons.

First, the panel members are professionals. If they were susceptible to that kind of influence, they shouldn’t be in the job.

Second, the inquiry doesn’t publish its report until months after a hearing, but they publish the papers disclosed in evidence immediately. So there’s ample time for public debate to apply undue influence to the panel if they were susceptible to it.

Anyway, going back to the missing witnesses. Let’s start with Lord Carlile. His report was loudly proclaimed at the time as being an expert review that meant Ealing Abbey was doing the right thing in following his recommendations.

But Carlile’s report dealt primarily with governance not safeguarding. His one new recommendation was a proposal for governance reform. He made no new recommendations about safeguarding, although 2 monks and 2 other teachers there have been convicted of abuse of pupils.

What’s more, Carlile warmly endorsed the school’s safeguarding policy, even though it still contained gaping holes in its commitment to report all safeguarding concerns to the authorities, as good safeguarding practice recommends.

So why didn’t Carlile notice this? Or did he notice and mistakenly believe this wasn’t important? We don’t know, and because he’s not being called as a witness we won’t find out.

Now let’s look at the Independent Schools Inspectorate. They inspected St Benedict’s School in November 2009 and gave the school a clean bill of health about safeguarding.

But the wording of the report makes it clear that they were not aware of the extent of the crimes Pearce was convicted of 3 months earlier, nor that the Charities Commission was running an investigation.

Nonetheless, they could see the school’s safeguarding policy at the time, which I have previously analysed in detail, and which can best be described as one long excuse never to have to report anything to anybody. But they noticed nothing wrong with it.

After I tipped them off, DfE ordered ISI to have another look the following April. This time, knowing exactly what to look for, ISI found numerous safeguarding shortcomings and issued an absolute stinker of a report.

Why did ISI miss the bad safeguarding policy first time around? We don’t know, and we won’t find out, because nobody from ISI is being called as a witness.

ISI inspects most independent schools, so if they are incompetent at inspecting for safeguarding, this has a significance far greater than just one school.

Now for DfE. DfE is the regulator of the entire educational sector. It is very unclear what (if any) powers DfE has to regulate independent schools, and what (if any) sanctions it has if an independent school has inadequate safeguarding

I know in principle DfE can deregister a school and thereby force its closure but it is not clear the circumstances under which it can do that, nor is it clear what the DfE’s policy is for applying that sanction.

Closing an independent school is something of a nuclear option. And it’s expensive. St Benedict’s has just over 1,000 pupils. It costs about £5k p.a. to educate a child in the state sector, so closing St Benedict’s would increase education spending by about £5m.

You can’t rely on local independent schools to take up the slack – they have to run at capacity or they can’t cover their costs. So the vast majority of the 1,000 pupils would have to be tipped into the state system.

But maybe some lesser sanction might be applied. Thing is, to the best of my knowledge there is no other sanction. There’s no sign that DfE ever took any action against St B. That’s odd, because we know from Carlile’s report that ministers took a personal interest in St. B.

So how much worse would the school have to get before DfE got off its backside and did something? We don’t know, and we won’t find out because nobody from DfE is being called as a witness.

There are similar questions that need to be asked of ISI and DfE about Ampleforth and Downside as well as Ealing. We know all about Ampleforth and Downside’s failings from IICSA’s report. But we don’t know how they were allowed to get so bad.

But a slavish adherence to its timetable is preventing IICSA from taking the time necessary to find out the truth.

In IICSA, the first “I” stands for Inadequate.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you Jonathan. Is there a sense they have become overwhelmed by the task in front of them? Just from this morning's proceedings, the scale of the human tragedy for victims, the criminal enormity sustained over years. And then the institutional obstructions. Do they have the power and passion to handle this?

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    1. The main problem is the too-strict timetable.

      With the help of my lawyers I'm doing my best to make sure they do all that is necessary. I'm not in a position to know what effect I'm having. We'll have to wait and see.

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  2. I've followed all of today's proceedings. Well done,Jonathan, for not being anonymous, getting this blog mentioned and for being exonerated by Leading Counsel for your campaign for justice. Keep up the good work.

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    1. Thanks. It's been exhausting these last couple of months, almost every evening and weekend spent reading through the inquiry documents and working with my lawyers to draft questions for the inquiry to use. This week will see the culmination of that work. You won't know which questions are mine because they are all asked by the inquiry's own lawyers, and even when I recognise one of my own I won't know whether they would have asked it anyway. In the end it doesn't matter who thinks of the questions so long as the truth is uncovered.

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