Ampleforth's Ofsted reports

Ampleforth made two applications to DfE to have the ban on new pupils lifted. In each case DfE commissioned Ofsted to conduct an inspection.

The first inspection took place on 6-8 February, and was a miserable failure for the school. As compared to the emergency Ofsted inspection of 24-25 September 2020, which resulted in the ban on pupils being imposed, there was very little improvement. The Independent Schools Standards the school was inspected against and is supposed to meet come under a number of headings.

Part 3. Welfare, health and safety of pupils

• The school passed paragraph 7(b) when it had failed in September
• The school continued to fail paragraphs 7, 7(a), 8, 8(a) and 8(b)
• The school failed paragraphs 16, 16(a) and 16(b) which it had passed previously

Part 5. Premises of and accommodation at schools

• The school passed paragraphs 28(1) and 28(1)(d) when it had failed in September

 Part 8. Quality of leadership in and management of schools

• The school continued to fail paragraphs 34(1), 34(1)(a), 34(1)(b), 34(1)(c) and 34(2)

In addition the school was assessed against various of the National Minimum Standards for residential provision in schools.

• Standard 11.1 remained unmet 
• Standards 13.3 and 13.4 remained unmet.

So the February inspection was not a marginal technical failure for Ampleforth, easily fixed by a tweak to a couple of processes and giving them a bit of time to "bed in". It was comprehensive, showing major weaknesses in most of what the school does about safeguarding. If the school was going to pass the next inspection, major changes would be needed.

This is not how the head teacher described it at the time. In a letter to parents on 9th March 2020 he said:

We have heard from the Secretary of State tonight that he recognises and welcomes the progress we have made but still requires further evidence before he will lift the restriction. However, he explicitly encourages us to hold a further inspection with the College now fully reopened after lockdown. We understand that he felt he could not revoke based on an inspection which took place when only very few children were on site.

Although disappointing, this remains in line with the messages we have been getting over the last few days, that one final push is required and that we are still on track for revocation before the end of term. We are formally writing to the Department for Education tomorrow to request that Ofsted return for a further visit. We have every confidence that this will deliver the outcome that we believe fairly represents Ampleforth College.

The school made that further application for the ban to be lifted and so DfE commissioned another inspection. Ofsted visited on 23-25th March. As you can see from the report, it was a disaster. There was not one single paragraph of either the Independent School Standards or the National Minimum Standards for boarding which had been failed in February which were now passed. On the contrary, Ofsted failed them again on paragraph 7(b) of the Independent School Standards which they had failed in September 2020 but passed in February 2021.

Here are some of the inspectors' comments in the report.

Leaders, including trustees, still do not know the full extent of poor recording and misreporting of safeguarding incidents over time. Five hundred and ninety-nine entries on the school’s online data storage tool, relating to 213 pupils who have already left the school, have not been checked yet.

It is worth noting that the fact that many reportable safeguarding incidents came to light in January when an external consultancy was engaged to help. The latest Ofsted inspection was on 23-25 March so they have had about 2 months to look through this.

When the February Ofsted report was published which first raised these incidents, the school tried to pass this off in public as data lying unsuspected in databases. That of course won't wash at all because the data must have been typed into the database by members of staff, and a decision made at the time not to report these incidents to the authorities. 

Despite attending safeguarding training, the designated safeguarding lead and the deputy designated safeguarding leads, on occasion, do not recognise potential risks to pupils that require following up. Deputy designated leads triage cases when they occur. Some do not have the knowledge required to triage competently or confidently. Even after triaging cases, potentially serious risks are not identified and followed up consistently well. During the inspection, the deputy safeguarding leads found it difficult to navigate the school’s online data tool for recording and managing safeguarding concerns.

This in as many words is saying that the Designated Safeguarding Lead and deputies don’t know how to do their jobs and can’t even operate the data system designed to record concerns. This is frighteningly bad. (The school has since advertised for a new Designated Safeguarding Lead.)

When pupils leave the school and transfer to another school in England, staff ensure they take up the place at their new school. Staff do not routinely check that pupils are admitted to overseas schools in a similar manner. As a result, these pupils are not safeguarded to the same extent as pupils transferring to schools in England.

Its arguable that children transferring abroad are potentially more at risk than those transferring, within the UK, given possible concerns about FGM or forced marriage. That’s why the rules apply irrespective of what country the pupil is transferring to.

Although some improvements have been made since the previous inspection in February 2021, weaknesses in the school’s safeguarding practice remain. A culture of safeguarding is still not embedded. These standards remain unmet.

It’s worth remembering that the February inspection (the one before this one) was commissioned by DfE at the school’s request so that the ban on new pupils could be lifted. The emergency inspection which resulted in the ban on new pupils took place in September 2020. They’ve now had six months to improve things. They aren’t even close.

Leaders have implemented a new safeguarding policy since the last inspection. The new policy refers to allegations against staff. The policy does not make explicit reference to the list of situations, as identified in paragraph 211 of ‘Keeping children safe in education’, when the allegations process should be followed.

The designated safeguarding lead made changes to the school’s new and published safeguarding policy during the inspection. However, some advice is incorrect, contradictory and unhelpful. For example, paragraph 10.2 states: ‘Anyone can make a referral. Any such referral must be made immediately and in any event within 24 hours of you becoming aware of the risk.’ Waiting 24 hours is not acceptable before making a referral to an appropriate body.

Similarly, in the ‘reporting a concern about a student’ flow chart on page 14, the policy states that the designated safeguarding lead and deputy safeguarding leads will ‘review the concern and make a decision no later than 24 hours about the next steps’. Concerns must be dealt with immediately.

The use of the words ‘should’ and ‘must’ is not consistent throughout the school’s new safeguarding policy. On occasion, the policy states how staff should respond to a safeguarding issue and, at other points, how staff must respond to the same issue.

Leaders did not know that they should inform the local authority when a pupil is removed from the school’s roll in-year, in accordance with paragraph 4.25 of the DfE’s ‘The Independent School Standards –Guidance for independent schools (2019)’.

This standard was met at the time of the last inspection but is now not met.

Getting your written policy right is actually the easiest part of doing safeguarding. It can be hard to get people to get people to follow good practice, but it is just about impossible if you don’t have a clear and correct policy to work from. Nobody knows where they stand.

There is an electronic system to record pupils’ attendance in lessons. Vulnerable pupils’ non-attendance is addressed within 15 minutes. Other pupils’ non-attendance is not addressed until they have missed an entire lesson and failed to turn up for the next lesson. This means that sometimes staff do not know where some pupils are or that they are safe.

It does seem rather a basic matter that in order to ensure pupils in your care are protected you have to know where they are.

There was a near-miss road traffic accident on site in early March 2021. The driver was a visitor to the school who was not accompanied by a member of the school’s staff. Just last week, a further serious safeguarding incident, relating to an unaccompanied visitor to the site, occurred. This second incident demonstrates that the school’s risk assessment policy and procedures are not applied consistently. Leaders’ actions to mitigate risks to pupils are not effective. A secure culture of safeguarding is not embedded in all aspects of the school’s work.

This speaks for itself.

Parents remain supportive of the school’s leadership. The statement ‘I can’t imagine that there is a safer school in the country at the moment’ is a typical response to Ofsted’s most recent survey of parents’ and carers’ views.

Ampleforth in its public statements repeatedly relies on parental endorsement. But the fact is that this is a boarding school – most of the parents aren’t around to see what is going on. If 20% of them have even read the school’s safeguarding policy it would be surprising.  But even if some have read it, for it to be understood it is essential to have a thorough understanding of safeguarding framework described by a former CEO of a large children’s charity as ‘a thicket.’

An external agency continues to support leaders to fulfil their statutory safeguarding duties. The agency has completed a review of the school’s counselling records. The counselling chronologies on the school’s online data storage tool are incomplete. The chief executive officer of the agency told inspectors that the school’s expertise in keeping pupils safe is improving.

Many of the actions in the external agency’s rapid improvement plan have been addressed. The trustee with oversight of safeguarding, who is carrying out some operational tasks in addition to strategic responsibilities currently, understands the need to develop a strategic plan to improve safeguarding further. The trustee told the inspectors that the next step for leaders is to develop such a strategic plan.

Ampleforth has in recent years been subject to devastating criticism from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA), has failed a number of Independent Schools Inspectorate inspections, been issued with a Warning Notice by DfE, failed an emergency Ofsted inspection and two follow-up inspections commissioned at the school’s request. And only now are they thinking that a strategic plan to improve safeguarding might be a good idea? That ship should have sailed years ago.

In January 2021, in its first review of the school’s safeguarding records, the external agency identified a number of recent cases of very serious child-on-child abuse. Subsequent to this, and to make sure all necessary actions have been taken, the designated safeguarding lead and deputy designated safeguarding leads have reviewed the online safeguarding records for every pupil who attends the school currently. Leaders plan to review the remaining online records of 213 former pupils by 3 July 2021.Trustees are not confident that they have a full knowledge of all child-on-child abuse that has taken place since the current online data storage tool for recording and managing safeguarding concerns was set up.

This is really quite deadly. IICSA’s primary criticism of Ampleforth was that it didn’t report safeguarding incidents to the authorities when it should have, and the school and abbey have been energetically claiming ever since that everything is different now, that the mistakes are all in the past. And yet, when an external body took a detailed look at the books, it turned out that a number of serious incidents still hadn’t been reported, and that the school even now isn’t sure whether all recent incidents that should have been reported actually have been, even though it appears to have a new "online data storage tool" that has been set up for that specific purpose. This is not "all in the past", these problems are very much in the present.

While the reporting of incidents is part of the Independent School Standards, there’s no legal obligation on any member of staff to make a report of abuse. So if the school chooses not to report there is little in practice that Ofsted and DfE can do to insist. All DfE can do in the end is to close the school if it sees persistent failures. Is has no other sanction. In all the cover-ups of abuse that have happened at Ampleforth in the past and which were investigated by IICSA, no individual has ever been prosecuted for failing to report abuse, because it isn’t a crime.

Leaders uploaded a new safeguarding policy to the school’s website this month. The new policy, like its predecessor, contains contradictions. This new policy did not go out for consultation to, and scrutiny by, the whole staff. The online version of the policy was amended by the school during this inspection, but the version number remains the same, version 1.0.

Some staff are dissatisfied with the way that changes are managed. Comments in Ofsted’s survey of staff include: ‘there is not time in our busy days to read and embed the amount of new policies coming in’; ‘too many policies in a short time frame and no time to actually read and embed them’; ‘changes are made without consultation and often decisions are reactive rather than proactive’; and ‘the chaotic organisation is incredibly difficult to adhere to as a teacher/tutor who has to put these overwhelmingly complex protocols and procedures into practice’.

There is a distinct sense in this comment from Ofsted of Corporal Jones of Dad’s Army running around in a complete funk shouting “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!”. The impression is that the senior management genuinely have little or no idea what they should be doing. It looks as if they don’t yet even realise how much of what they are doing is wrong, let alone how to put it right.

There is not a single area in which the school failed in February where Ofsted was able to say that “the standards are now met”. On the contrary, there was one area where the school had previously met the requirements where Ofsted said they were “now not met”. The most charitable thing the inspectors were able to say was that:

Although some improvements have been made since the previous inspection in February 2021, weaknesses in the school’s safeguarding practice remain. A culture of safeguarding is still not embedded.”

So the school failed the Ofsted inspection in March about as badly as it failed in February. The tone of the two reports is remarkably similar. There is little or no tangible progress towards meeting the standards that all other independent schools must meet.