Ofsted and safeguarding

"Procedures for safeguarding pupils are robust; staff and the designated governor are well informed about child protection. Good practice in multi-agency work to support individual pupils is an example of the school's effective partnership work."

Any primary school headteacher would be pleased to have safeguarding at his school described this way in an OFSTED report. The parents will be reassured by such a ringing endorsement of good practice.

There’s just one small problem. Those words were written by OFSTED about Little Heath Primary, the school attended by Daniel Pelka. Less than a year later he was dead, his emaciation, hunger and visible bruises noticed but unreported by the school as child protection concerns. The Serious Case Review, after detailing all the symptoms that were noticed but not passed on, stated the following:

"The system within the school to respond to safeguarding concerns was therefore dysfunctional at this time. The schools own safeguarding and child protection policy does not make it clear what the internal arrangements were for reporting and recording concerns."

This is a very different conclusion from OFSTED’s, albeit with the benefit of hindsight. There is no reason to think that safeguarding suddenly went bad in the intervening period. There was no change of headteacher (who was also the designated teacher for safeguarding) and no change of policy in the intervening time. Given that Daniel died, it is clear that OFSTED missed some shockingly bad practice.

Five minutes’ perusal of the school’s safeguarding policy should have alerted the inspectors. Good practice is very difficult to achieve without clear written procedures, and the procedures were nonexistent.

Ten months after Daniel’s death, OFSTED went back and inspected the school again. This is what they then said:

“The arrangements for the safeguarding of pupils meet requirements. The school carries out the necessary checks on adults to ensure that they are suitable to work with children.”

There was no mention of any lessons learned or changes of procedure that had been made. There was not even any mention of Daniel or his death. From the report there's no evidence that OFSTED invoked its additional procedures for inspecting a school where a serious safeguarding incident has occurred or a child has died, no reason to think that the inspectors were even aware that Daniel had been a pupil at the school.

And no lessons had been learned and no procedures had been changed. The same child protection policy, issued in 2009, was still in use at the time of the second OFSTED inspection. OFSTED missed the bad practice - again.

We can’t even go back and look in detail at what was missed and why. As I understand it, six months after a report is issued, the inspectors’ original notes are destroyed. So nobody, not even OFSTED itself, can see what they actually looked at during the inspection. Effectively, the death of Daniel and the school's safeguarding failures have been expunged from OFSTED's records of the school.

This is just one school which I have chosen to describe in some detail, but it is one example out of many. I have read quite a few other Serious Case Reviews, such as Hillside First School where Nigel Leat abused for 14 years, and Bishop Bell Academy where Jeremy Forrest taught until he abducted a pupil to France. There is a recurring theme of schools having seriously deficient arrangements for recording and reporting child protection concerns, deficiencies missed by OFSTED, sometimes in several successive inspections.

In addition, I have obtained the safeguarding policies for 114 of Coventry’s schools, almost every school in the city. Only about a third contain clearly stated procedures for internal reporting of child protection concerns, passing on those reports to external agencies, and proper record-keeping. By my estimation, about 14% were as bad as Little Heath or worse. I’ve also looked at their most recent OFSTED reports. OFSTED doesn’t have a bad word to say about safeguarding at any of them! This is not a past problem now resolved by improved practice, it appears that OFSTED is even now giving good reports to schools with bad safeguarding arrangements.

The available evidence suggests that OFSTED's threadbare safeguarding inspections do not reliably recognise even appallingly bad safeguarding practice. That is a matter of serious concern to us all. If OFSTED cannot assure good safeguarding in schools, perhaps the job should be given to a separate agency which can.

(This article originally appeared a week ago in CYP Now magazine.)

Safeguarding and School Inspections

At 12:29, a commenter on the Interregnum thread asked the following

Will you be looking at all Schools child protection or just fee paying schools?
If you have a child at a paying school you can just get up and change schools,(although I do not think your readers do) but at state schools you have no choice, or is it your view that child protection problems only happen in fee paying schools?

That's a very good and intelligent question, and deserves a fuller and more prominent answer than can be fitted into a comment.

I'm well aware that child protection problems can occur in any variety of school, for instance at Dormers Wells High School in Ealing there have been two recent cases, one concerning a former caretaker and  another concerning a learning mentor. I don't doubt that there were shortcomings in the child protection measures there, which were missed by the inspectorates.

But there is a particular problem with private schools, which you describe when you say "you can just get up and change schools".

In fact, it's not quite as easy to change schools as you might think, especially if lots of other parents are trying to make the same change at the same time. Just imagine for a moment how many places are available mid-year or at the start of a year that isn't a normal intake year at the other private schools in this area. I've heard that some of the other local private schools have been inundated with enquiries from St A and St B parents, far more than they could possibly accommodate.

That means if you are sufficiently dissatisfied with your child's private school, your choice may be limited to keeping him or her there or moving into the state system, were the authorities are legally obliged to make a place available. So once you are in a private school, you are essentially stuck in the event of a serious problem there, unless you decide that the state system isn't all that bad a choice after all.

The issue of the relative merits of the state and private systems could be the subject of a long debate, which I don't have space to address here. All I would say is that the psychological effects of child sex abuse can be long-term and devastating to the victim. Your child's life chances are probably much better following a state education not involving abuse than a private education where your child is abused. Therefore, whatever your opinion of the state system in general, if you have reason to think that your child is at risk of being abused in his or her current private school, I would strongly recommend a move.

But even given the difficulties of moving schools once a pupil is established, a paedophile case can be terribly bad for business at a private school. We have had comments on this blog from parents who were thinking of sending their daughters to St Augustine's, and who thought better of it as a result of reading the ISI report and the comments here.

So there is a tremendous temptation for private schools to look after their own short-term business interests by keeping incidents or allegations of abuse quiet and not reporting them to the authorities, and so avoiding the attendant publicity. In doing so, I've heard of cases where the school has pressured the parents not to make their own independent reports to the police or social services, on the grounds that there is no need to further add to the distress of the child by subjecting them to interrogation by social services.

And so the parents are robbed of precisely the support and advice that they need in order to look after the welfare and best interests of their child. If this sort of thing is not going to be common within private schools, it is an absolute necessity that the chance that the school will be found out is high, and the penalty for this kind of deception is prohibitive. At a minimum, failure to take proper child protection measures in response to an allegation of sex abuse should cost the people responsible their careers in teaching. If headteachers of private schools realise that they aren't going to to keep their £100k jobs very long if they try to hide abuse, then reporting will become much better.

Don't think of this issue as being limited to Catholic schools. Certainly there has been abuse at some Catholic schools, but it is by no means unique to them. Intelligent paedophiles seek out jobs involving care of children,and so all schools need to be on their guard about this. The documentary Chosen describes in harrowing detail the abuses perpetrated on boys at Caldicot School, a secular private boarding school. If you want to understand the dynamics of abuse in a private school, how the children are groomed, how the teachers' position of authority over both the children and their parents is used to suppress reporting, and the devastating effect of abuse on the subsequent lives of the victims, then I cannot recommend strongly enough that you view that documentary. The whole programme can be viewed online at the link I have provided. When I looked it the programme, I found that there were very strong parallels between the abuse and grooming techniques described there, and the techniques used by Father David Pearce, as described in the prosecution's statement at his sentencing hearing in October 2009.

You need to understand how it works if you are to recognise warning signs that it might be happening at your children's school. And you need also to have some idea what to do about it if the warning signs are there.

St. Benedict's and St. Augustine's are absolutely perfect case studies for this. We have a great deal of documentation, sufficient to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt how abjectly the inspectorates have failed the pupils of those two schools. I'm in regular touch with Tom Perry of Questions4Schools, one of the participants in Chosen. He is campaigning to have these failings addressed at a national level, and I'm very happy to help him in any way possible. The FOI information mentioned in the comments may help this process on, and I would be very grateful if the person who obtained it would contact me on a private and confidential basis.

Little Ted's

From today's Guardian website.

Poor regulation, inadequate staff training and a lack of supervision created an "ideal environment" in which nursery worker Vanessa George could abuse children in her care, a serious case review concluded today. The regulator Ofsted was criticised for not picking up concerns about Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth, where George sexually assaulted infants.

Members of the Plymouth Safeguarding Children Board, which carried out the review, found the inspection regime was a "tick box" exercise and called for the government to look at the way checks are carried out by the regulator.

It's worth remembering that Ofsted is responsible for quality assessment of the ISI, who carried out successive inspections of St. Benedict's School without finding anything amiss. Coincidence? I think not.

And Ofsted has recently praised the quality of the ISI's inspections.

What a joke!

Ofsted has just issued a notice in which it pats itself and the other inspectorates on the back for all the good work they are doing.

Ofsted has praised the quality of inspections carried out by the three inspectorates (other than Ofsted) that inspect independent schools - and advised them on how to continue improving their inspection services.

...


In our recent letters to the inspectorates, Ofsted noted that all inspectorates were operating well and met the standards for an approved inspection body in independent schools.

Ofsted also recognised the expertise of the lead inspectors across all the inspectorates, the good evidence base they gathered to substantiate judgements, their good communication and engagement with schools and the fact they all took safeguarding very seriously. Their reports were clear and useful to schools.

In the 2010 report letter on the quality of the inspections and reports by the ISI, written by Christine Gilbert, HM Chief Inspector of Schools (i.e. the head of Oftsed) to Christine Ryan, Chief Inspector of the ISI, Gilbert is full of praise for the professionalism and efficiency of the ISI inspectors. The letter was written on 25th August 2010. It makes no mention of safeguarding or child protection. It makes no mention of any shortcomings in this area, with respect to St, Benedict's or any other school (and there have been failings at other schools as well).

This is praise for the ISI inspectors who completely missed the clear regulatory failings in the Child Protection Policy at St. Benedict's School, and who only noticed that there were any problems when they made a further visit at the insistence of the DfE, who had in turn been told by a member of the public (i.e. me) about convictions of former teachers during the current inspection period.

What a joke. What a sick joke.