Ampleforth's governance

A significant part of the March 23-25 Ofsted report looked at governance of the school. The report said:

The St Laurence Education Trust and the Ampleforth Abbey Trust remain linked closely.

The corporate and sole trustee of the Ampleforth Abbey Trust, the Ampleforth Abbey Trustees (a company limited by guarantee) is one of eleven members of the St Laurence Education Trust. The Ampleforth Abbey Trust met the financial losses of the St Laurence Education Trust in the 2017–18 and 2018–19 financial years. The Ampleforth Abbey Trust owns the land the school’s buildings sit on.

The links between the abbey and the school are evident in the everyday life of the school. Some facilities, such as information technology, including telephony, continue to be shared between the abbey and the school. Up until mid-January, emails from the headteacher to all academic staff were also sent to some members of the monastic community. A dean, who resides in the monastery, is on the senior leadership team of the school. The dean ensures that the school’s Benedictine ethos remains central to the school’s leadership team.

This is much more serious than it looks at first sight. After all, who cares who runs the school so long as it is run well? But this needs to be taken in the context of the report on Ampleforth and its sister school Downside by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which contained the following conclusion.

A strict separation between the governance of these two abbeys and schools will be required if safeguarding arrangements are to be free from the often‑conflicting priorities of the abbeys. This took too long to achieve at Ampleforth.

In his closing remarks to the hearing, Ampleforth's legal representative claimed that this separation had already been achieved.

The evidence heard by the inquiry and in the documents submitted since show that, since 1997, the college and the junior school at Ampleforth had been run by a separate educational trust, the St Laurence Education Trust. Since 2010, that trust has a majority of lay trustees, has always been chaired by a deputy chair, who is a layperson, and, whenever safeguarding issues were discussed, that deputy lay chair took the chair of the trust. Since this year, 2017, the St Laurence Education Trust not only has a majority of lay trustees, but it also has a lay chair, Claire Smith.

It is the St Laurence Education Trust, not the abbey, which runs the school. That is intended to be a permanent arrangement. Ampleforth took the decision in 1997 to separate the school effectively from the Abbey Trust and has been working ever since to solidify that aim. That has continued to be the position, and will continue to be the position as it is now embedded in its constitution. The combined effects of the changes to the composition of the trust has been its composition has altered from that of an entirely monastic trusteeship to one which is now one-third monastic and two-thirds lay, creating an open structure which is accountable to external lay people.

So complete separation was regarded as essential by IICSA. It was claimed by Ampleforth’s legal representative that it had already been achieved in 2017, and this seems to have been accepted at face value by IICSA. Its report said "this took too long to achieve at Ampleforth" suggesting that IICSA believed that the separation was complete at the time of writing the report. And yet here is Ofsted saying that this separation is a mirage – it doesn’t exist in practice.

As recently as 29th December 2020, the head teacher Robin Dyer was robustly extolling the virtues of the current senior leadership team (SLT) and governors (including several newly-appointed) in an interview with Times Radio.

“I run the school. My SLT and the new Board of Trustees. We run the school. We're not beholden to the monastery as was in the past.”

In a document linked to an email sent by the school to parents and former pupils on 7th December 2020, the school stated.

“Driven by our failures in the past, over the past 18 months we have put in place a robust safeguarding regime in consultation with the Charity Commission; a new governance structure, including new Trustees, that has effectively separated the Abbey from the College; and a new and experienced senior leadership team. During this time, the Independent Schools Inspectorate has endorsed our actions through two successful inspections and the Charity Commission has discharged their Interim Safeguarding Manager. Ofsted’s report and the DfE’s action does not reflect the school we are today.”

So that’s on at least two separate occasions that the school has claimed that a separation has been implemented. The separation was claimed to be complete in 2017 when Ampleforth's legal representative spoke at IICSA, and an entirely separate separation was claimed by the headmaster to have occurred in the 18 months up to December 2020. And yet Ofsted has found the organisations "remain linked closely".

The linkages actually go deeper than even Ofsted mentioned in its report. In a letter to the Secretary of State Gavin Williamson, Richard Scorer, a solicitor who represented many Ampleforth abuse survivors at the IICSA hearings, described the extent of the dependency of the school on the abbey and the the effect of this on the school's ability to achieve good safeguarding practice.

Ofsted also had words to say about the composition of the governing body of the school.

All but two trustees are connected to the school as past pupils, spouses of past pupils or parents of pupils. The chair of trustees identified the need for the inclusion of more trustees from an educational background who have no previous or current connections with the school. He identified rightly the benefits a more diverse board of trustees would bring to the school.

This realisation is very new to the school, since it appointed two new trustees in June 2019 and another six in September 2019, and even with these new appointees only two trustees had no previous or current connection with the school. As noted above headmaster Robin Dyer was extolling the current board of trustees as recently as December 2020.

This is another area where what the school says and what is happening are somewhat at odds. Here is part of the Chair of Trustees' message to parents on 16 April 2021.

Over the past 18 months, we have wanted to increase the diversity of our Trustees, something which has been hard to do under the current circumstances. To reinforce the independence of the College’s governance, we will ensure that half of our Board is made up of trustees without links to Ampleforth College or to the Abbey by this autumn.

The "current circumstances" presumably means the Enforcement Notice. But that was only in place for the last five months, not eighteen. If it has really been serious about increasing diversity among the trustees for eighteen months, then it must have been attempting this without any tangible result almost ever since the last six (mostly non-diverse) trustees were appointed. But to the best of my knowledge there has been nothing in previous messages to parents about looking for new trustees from a more diverse background. On the contrary they said in December that over the last 18 months they had put in place "a new governance structure, including new Trustees" making no mention of the fact that they thought it still in need of radical change.

I suspect that neither the school, nor Ofsted or even DfE had considered this until Richard Scorer wrote to DfE on 25 February pointing out his concern about the lack of diversity in the trustees.

Of the eleven current trustees of St Laurence Education Trust shown on the Ampleforth College website, nine are former pupils or parents of former pupils. ... As you may be aware, a lack of diversity of background within trustee boards and governing bodies has been identified by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse as a risk factor for safeguarding failings in schools.

Of course, I'll stand corrected if the trustees decide to publish minutes of trustee meetings over the past 18 months in which progress in the search for diverse trustees is reported.

Ofsted hasn't said in its report what changes in governance would be needed in order to pass its next inspection. Whatever they are, given the number of times Ampleforth has claimed that a separation has been achieved when it wasn't, it is to be hoped that Ofsted examines the small print of any changes very carefully.