The DfE's decision on Ampleforth

On the face of it, the DfE's decision to lift the ban on new pupils at Ampleforth makes no sense at all. Two requests from the school to lift the ban, each of which triggered an Ofsted inspection which found serious and multiple safeguarding shortcomings. On 9th March in response to the February Ofsted report, DfE decided to maintain the ban, but on 14th April, having received the March Ofsted report with almost identical results, the ban was lifted. Why?

The process for recruiting new pupils in independent schools supplies the context for the decision. Schools like to get their roll for the following September finalized by Easter. It provides financial certainty and allows proper planning for staffing levels etc for the following year. But for as long as the ban was in place, Ampleforth was unable to guarantee that any prospective pupils would actually be able to take up their places.

Almost all those pupils would have had backup offers from other schools. Had the ban lasted even a week longer, those other schools would have been pressuring parents to make a final decision where they wanted to send their children. The 165 prospective new pupils that Ampleforth says it has on its books would rapidly have melted away. 165 pupils equates approximately £5 million in fees at risk. (The precise figure would depend on the mix of junior and senior, and the mix of boarders and day pupils.)

That £5m would not just be for one year. It's very hard to recruit significant numbers of pupils except at the standard entry points (1st year junior, first year senior, lower 6th), so that "missing year" would gradually move up through the school depressing fee income for some years. 

The school is already in the red, it can't afford a loss of income on this scale. In recent years it has been subsidised by the Abbey which itself is in a tricky financial position and cannot afford indefinitely to bail out the school. The school owns no assets of its own, and so cannot borrow to tide it over. Almost certainly, had the ban not been lifted immediately, the school would have closed at the end of the summer term. No doubt the school and its friends and lobbyists made it clear to Gavin Williamson that a decision to delay lifting the ban was a decision to close the school.

It may well be that DfE never had any intention of forcing the school to close. After all, closing the school might result in the pupils having to be educated in the state system at public expense! Conservative governments are inclined to go to great lengths to help private schools. Most of their MPs and cabinet members were educated in them. So it's reasonable to suppose that DfE just wanted to give Ampleforth a bit of a scare and get the leadership team to pull its socks up. 

The Independent Schools Standards aren't that hard to meet. There are 2,500 independent schools in England and the rest of them seem to manage without too much difficulty. With even moderate competence and a bit of effort, the school should have been able by Easter to improve to the point where it passed an Ofsted inspection, and that is probably what DfE expected to happen. Ban lifted, school firmly slapped on the wrist, everyone happy.

But DfE perhaps didn't realise how deeply ingrained the problem was even after the September Ofsted report, and didn't count on the refusal of Ampleforth to believe it had a safeguarding problem at all, even when facing imminent closure. The school wasted valuable time challenging the original Ofsted report. The emergency Ofsted inspection was on 24-25 September. Because of the school's appeal against the result, the report was not published until 10th December. Even after Ampleforth was informed of the ban on new pupils on 27th November, the school was publicly claiming that Ofsted had got it wrong. the rest of the autumn term was wasted while the trustees and senior leadership team remained in denial.

The headmaster Robin Dyer was still following this line when he gave an interview to Times Radio on 29th December 2020. This is what he said in response to a question about what the school needed to do next.

There are three things I think. One we need an inspection and a new inspection team to arrive, whether it be the Independent Schools Inspectorate or Ofsted, to come with a fresh approach, fresh mind, perhaps not necessarily with the mindset of the inspection that occurred in September. So that's number one and we need that really in mid-January because any longer and the Restriction order will impact very adversely on the school.

The second thing is I think we need some political input here, because the secretary of state has issued this order. It seems to be cast in the past. It seems to be about 2016 to 2018 and remarkably little about what has happened in the school since August 19 when I started to lead the school, so I think we need some political action to be honest with you.

And third we need a much better relationship with North Yorkshire Safeguarding Partnership, NYSCP it is called, who we think are not terribly happy with the idea of the college living alongside a separate institution, the monastery. They seem to feel that the old relationship of the past continues and that isn't the case, we’re now separate institutions.

In the answer to a single question he insulted the professionalism of Ofsted, suggested that decisions affecting the safety of pupils should be the subject of political lobbying, and made an extremely misleading statement about the degree of separation between the College and Abbey. His view was that Ofsted needed to change their attitude, the DfE must forget the past and NYSCP should turn a blind eye to the proximity of the Abbey and its monks.

It's hard to imagine a course of action more likely to enrage the Ofsted inspectors and sow distrust of the school at the DfE. The headmaster seemed not to have realised that the school's future in all probability depended on the good opinion of just two people: the lead Ofsted inspector for the next visit and the Secretary of State for Education.

By the time the headmaster and the governors finally realised that the concerns of Ofsted and DfE weren't going to go away and had to be addressed (no matter how much they might privately or even publicly disagree), the autumn term was over, and it was clear that because of Covid the school would be unable to open as normal in January. This was an extremely stupid misjudgement on the part of those running the school. (Precisely who was responsible for this policy is of course not really known given the somewhat opaque governance arrangements and the school's continuing dependence on the Abbey.)

It was at this point that the Safeguarding Alliance was commissioned by the school to come in to advise and assist. I suspect what they found when they conducted an audit in January severely shocked the leadership of the school. The audit found (amongst many other problems) a bunch of recent peer-on-peer abuse cases which should have been reported to the authorities but hadn't been. IICSA's principal criticism of Ampleforth in its 2018 report had been the school's failure to report abuse to the authorities. This new finding completely shattered the claim that all those problems of not reporting abuse were long past. On the contrary they were still horrifyingly current.

The school had already made an application to DfE for the ban to be lifted, and Ofsted arrived on 3rd February to inspect. There was no time to do anything other than come clean and promise to start improving. Had the school tried to hide the Safeguarding Alliance findings from Ofsted and Safeguarding Alliance not been willing to go along with this and blown the whistle, then the February inspection report would have been even more catastrophic (from the school's point of view) than it actually was. (I'm not saying this was ever seriously considered as an option, just explaining the probable consequences had it been attempted.)

Even so, the February inspection was a disastrous failure, and by the time the DfE decision to maintain the ban was announced on 9th March the spring term was almost over. A change of mind from DfE following a further inspection after Easter would be too late. So another application to revoke the ban was made immediately and maximum pressure no doubt applied to DfE to get Ofsted to visit again before the end of term. They just scraped in: Ofsted visited on 23-25 March, the last three full days of the spring term.

By now, the trustees and senior leadership team had almost certainly realised that actually passing the March Ofsted inspection was an unattainable goal. The headteacher effectively said as much to the Yorkshire Post, as they reported 13th February.

Mr Dyer, who joined Ampleforth from Wellington College in Berkshire in 2019, admitted that the school would close if the decision were not reversed.

He has led reforms and accepts that Ampleforth's past is 'indefensible'.

He has removed several senior staff from their posts but says that a further three years would be required to oversee a complete overhaul of the school's culture.

This is a remarkable change from the belligerent tone adopted in the interview with Times Radio a mere six weeks earlier. It sounds like an exercise in managing expectations - telling DfE that they couldn't possibly be expected to get all the way to passing Ofsted in one go and should be allowed an extended period of time in which to bring themselves up to standard. They pinned their hopes on making enough improvement that they could justify a decision by DfE to lift the ban while they continued to work at it. 

But they blew it. This strategy required that they show some substantial improvement to show they were on the right path, but the March report was no better than February and in some ways worse, partly because DfE and Ofsted had finally noticed that they needed to take a hard look at governance and the school's claims about separation from the abbey.

But because the school wanted to remain open and DfE presumably didn't really want to force it into closure, something had hastily to be cobbled together to justify lifting the ban. The local MP Kevin Hollinrake said he had "had a number of conversations with the Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson". I'm sure there were several meetings to try and come to some arrangement that would save face all round.

The result was a triumph of political lobbying. It might have been better had the school put the same effort into being good at safeguarding and not needed its political lobbying capabilities. In the end DfE announced that:

Our robust action in relation to the school has secured unprecedented commitments to improve governance and safeguarding. With this in mind, we have lifted the restriction on Ampleforth admitting new pupils. We will be monitoring it closely and if it is not meeting the standards at the next inspection we will not hesitate to consider whether further action is necessary.

The DfE is remarkably vague as to what (if any) action it will take if the school fails the next Ofsted inspection. Promising that they "will not hesitate to consider whether further action is necessary" is about as meaningless a statement as it is possible to make. It commits the DfE to precisely nothing and leaves open the option of letting Ampleforth get away indefinitely with failing to meet basic safeguarding standards.

The DfE's actions (such as they are) are the opposite of robust and the requirements are unprecedented only in their leniency in the circumstances. Any other school that has got this bad and not improved has actually been closed.

Some of the commitments demanded of the school have been disclosed by DfE to the press.

The school has committed to a formal action plan to sustain a strong safeguarding culture and meet the independent school standards in full at the point of its next Ofsted inspection in autumn 2021.

That word "sustain" is rather curious in this context. Achieving a strong safeguarding culture needs to come first before we can think about sustaining it, and that still seems a distant goal.

Amongst other measures, it is to make substantial changes to the trust board, appointing new trustees with no previous connection to either the school or the Abbey, employ a new, experienced designated safeguarding lead, and contract an external agency to provide ongoing safeguarding support for a period of three years.

It is also to commission twice yearly independent monitoring reviews of its safeguarding practices, with findings made available to the Department. This will be in addition to Ofsted inspections as required.

The action plan hasn't been disclosed, so we have no idea what these "other measures" are, what else  the school has actually promised to do and by when. Without that, neither staff nor parents nor public have any means of telling what progress is being made.

Of the measures we have been told about, the most striking is the requirement to "employ a new, experienced designated safeguarding lead". It looks as if the school has been forced to accept that the existing designated safeguarding lead was part of the problem. Hardly surprising given that Ofsted had made serious and specific criticisms about his competence. But it doesn't reflect well on the headmaster and trustees that it took three Ofsted inspections failing specifically on safeguarding and the need for an action plan that would satisfy DfE for this decision to be forced on them.

A job advert has already been posted for his replacement. From the wording of the job ad, it looks as if they expect the new person to arrive immediately (without working out their notice at their previous school), hit the ground running and transform safeguarding in the school in a single term in time to pass an Ofsted inspection in the autumn. All while working on a temporary contract. That's a challenging brief to put it mildly. The new person will need to work miracles.

A great deal of independent monitoring for the next three years has been demanded. This is an indication of how deeply DfE mistrusts the school. It is pretty clear that DfE has agreed with the headmaster's revised view that it will take three years to change the school culture and have concluded that they need to keep close tabs on the place for the entire duration. I expect that the Warning Notice is going to remain in force for all that time, so any backsliding by the school could easily see the ban re-imposed. Even for an old-established public school with friends in high places, there is ultimately a limit to how much patience the DfE can justify.

All the additional support that DfE is demanding that the school obtain is going to be expensive. The school is going to have to pay for it out of fee income, and the finances aren't great at the moment.

Overall though, whole thing stinks. The government has scrambled to find some figleaf of justification to avoid making a decision that (for the safety of the pupils) it knows it should, but doesn't want to for fear of upsetting friends. I guess the main reason this story hasn't hit the news to a greater extent is that it has had to compete with much bigger stories about government cronyism.