Carlile Report analysis - 7

The next section, paragraphs 44 to 46, is titled "Post Nolan and Cumberlege procedures" contains some of Carlile's most trenchant common sense combined with the most amazing failure to follow that common sense to its logical conclusion.

He starts extremely well.

Of course, the governance of a school or any other institution is no guarantor of good practice. To state the obvious, effective practice depends upon a strong set of written procedures, the management to enforce them, and the commitment to effective enforcement.

Hallelujah! I thought that in all this business about governance he would never actually manage to state this extremely obvious but vitally important point.

In the next paragraph, albeit in the specific context of the reporting arrangements for the school nurse, he goes on to make another very acute comment.

it is possible that, from time to time, allegations will be made against teaching colleagues regarded as of the highest quality and probity, and the danger of the allegations being brushed aside by understandably incredulous colleagues is significant.

Yes! This is the point! Not only is there simply the matter of straightforward incredulity, but this is going to be reinforced by a will to disbelieve caused by the fact that believing and acting on the allegations may damage the reputation of the school. Carlile goes on to say:

At the very least, it should be a given that any person who is or is analogous to a school nurse should be required to report all concerns and allegations about abuse to the Head, Deputy Head and/or designated safeguarding officers. It is also self-evident from these comments that the skills, training and approach of any such employee should be equal to the challenge of abuse allegations, whether such allegations be true or false.

All true and extremely sensible. But the problem is that he stops there, and fails to take the vital next step, which is that particular measures must be taken not to permit this incredulity to determine the subsequent action of the designated safeguarding officer. He must promptly pass on all allegations to the authorities, specifically to the LADO. There must be absolutely no exceptions to this. Only by having a policy of no exceptions can the children be protected from the entirely natural inclination of staff and monks to believe their colleagues incapable of such a thing.

Given that the shortcomings of the school's past practice have been particularly about the school's failure to report allegations to the authorities, this point really needed to be made absolutely explicit in the report. It isn't. Such an opportunity missed.

Carlile Report analysis - 6

The next section covering paragraphs 37 to 43 is titled "Best practice: the Nolan and Cumberlege reviews". Carlile includes the following brief extract from the Nolan report

Recommendation 1. The Catholic Church in England and Wales should become an example of best practice in the prevention of child abuse and in responding to it.

3.1.8 The 1994 Guidelines concentrated on the response to allegations of child abuse. In the present climate, much more emphasis is placed on child protection and it is worthy of note that almost all dioceses have in fact adopted policies and practices that are designed to prevent abuse occurring in the first place. Whilst the proper handling of allegations is important, it is much more important that the opportunity for abuse does not occur because awareness is high and an effective regime of good practice is in place, and is known to be so.
Recommendation 2. The top priority is to have preventative policies and practices operating effectively in parishes, dioceses and religious orders that will minimise the opportunity for abuse.

3.1.9 It is necessary, however, to face the reality that no organisation which has dealings with children can eliminate the risk of child abuse completely. It is therefore important to complement prevention policies with a clear understanding by those in positions of responsibility that abuse of their position in any way will inevitably have the most serious consequences for them.

All very good in principle. The problem with the Nolan report is that the principle isn't followed up with properly effective practice. For instance, this is recommendation 61 of the Nolan report

Recommendation 61. When there is a disclosure, the statutory authorities should be brought in straight away, without any process of filtering, to take the lead in investigating and assessing the situation

If that "should" had been a "shall" then it would have been the basis for an effective policy - if followed. But having "should" there allows people at the local (parish or school) level to subvert the intent of the recommendation by writing exceptions which neuter it. Nolan reported in 2001, but eight years later, the child protection policy for St. Benedict's was so far from implementing the Nolan recommendations that it was essentially one long excuse for never reporting anything. As the ISI stated in its 2010 supplementary report:

The school did not have a fully established policy for reporting directly to the Department for Education and Skills (later the Department for Children, Schools and Families, and currently the Department for Education) or to the Independent Safeguarding Authority, responsible for such referrals since 20 January 2009.

But as Nolan only said "should", the abbey would have been able to claim if asked that they were complying with the Nolan recommendation, even though they didn't have an effective policy for reporting anything to anyone.

Carlile mentioned that the Cumberlege commission reviewed the situation after 5 years, their report being published in 2007. In paragraph 39, Carlile notes that

One of the members of the Cumberlege Commission was the Abbot President then and now of the English Benedictine Congregation. To objective observers it will be a disappointment that the governance of Ealing Abbey, St Benedict’s School and other related schools were not subjected to a governance review within a short time.

The Abbot President is Richard Yeo. At the press conference, Carlile criticised the appointment of Yeo to conduct the Apostolic Visitation, arguing that he had too close a connection with Ealing Abbey for any review by him both to be independent and to be seen to be independent.

All of Carlile's criticisms are entirely valid, and yet he has still missed the key point. It's not the governance that had to be reviewed, it was the existence sand implementation of appropriate and effective child protection policies. The school's was useless, and the parish in fact had no policy at all.

In fact, as far as I can tell, the parish still doesn't have a child protection policy. The Ealing abbey website has a child protection statement, and a link to the CSAS procedures, without actually stating that the CSAS procedures are being implemented in the parish. I have my criticism of the CSAS procedures and its extremely unfriendly website, but that's a story for another day. For now, it is sufficient to say that even after all the publicity, the Ealing Abbey website still doesn't have an unequivocal statement declaring what (if any) child protection procedures it is following. I would have hoped Carlile might have noticed that, but there is no mention of it in the report.

Carlile ends this section of his report with the following.

43. The above comments should not be seen in any way as implying that the Abbey Community should now, in 2011, be seen as a failure. My meetings with them suggest that is not the case. The vitality, academic success, community reach and diversity of the school are evidence of the positive aspects of the Abbey and St Benedict’s School. As one of my interlocutors put it:

“Any community of Christian men and women who take their Christian vocation seriously is going to be grappling all the time with the consequences of human sinfulness and our natural backsliding tendency.”

This very realistic person recognised that there are ‘backsliding tendencies’ so unacceptable that there can be almost no limit to the level of vigilance required. The outcome of the events under consideration, and of this Report, should be to provide assurance that the lessons have been learned.

It may well be true that the school is awash with "vitality, academic success, community reach and diversity. That doesn't for a minute excuse it for its shortcomings in safeguarding. In any case, Carlile is no more an expert in education that he is an expert on safeguarding procedures, and he's completely unqualified to make that statement.You can give it whatever weight you think it deserves.

In this section, Carlile has noticed that Abbot Richard Yeo (who was a participant in the Cumberlege Commission) failed to ensure that governance of the school was reviewed post-Cumberlege, but hasn't noticed the far more important point, that safeguarding at the school and parish were also not reviewed, because it is those policies which provide the primary protection against the backsliding tendency which Carlile's correspondent so correctly identifies.

You don't get a mess like Ealing without there having been management failures at multiple levels. Three such failures are now clearly visible. The headmaster should have been implementing an effective policy and proposing improvements in it for the Trustees' agreement and approval. The Abbot should have been taking note of the Nolan and Cumberlege recommendations and taking action to see to it that they were effectively implemented. And the Abbot President should have been conducting a review of all the English Benedictine houses to ensure as far as possible that Nolan and especially Cumberlege were getting implemented.

But none of this happened. This isn't a mere historical tragedy, this a serious failure of the duty of care on the part of the current management. Had even one of these three levels of management been doing their job properly, then the school's and probably the abbey's child protection procedures would have been in a fit state. And we know that at least one child suffered as a result of that failure.

More on Soper

The Mail on Sunday has more revelations about Abbot Laurence Soper.

The Mail on Sunday has been told that after hiding in Montenegro on the Adriatic coast – where the European Arrest Warrant is not valid – he secretly returned to the Vatican to empty his account.

Fr Laurence, 68, who worked at Barclays Bank between 1960 and 1964 before becoming a monk, is said to have several thousand pounds in investment portfolios and also a ‘large inheritance’ from his parents.

I see that the reports of his age have been changed. The police originally stated that he was 81, and this was reported in various papers at the time. The Mail is now reporting that he is 68. I've independently been told that the original statement concerning his age was wrong. I wonder who could have told the police that he was 80 at the time he was interviewed by them in September last year? And I wonder why?

Carlile Report analysis - 5

The next section, including paragraphs 35 and 36 is titled "Creating necessary safeguards".

Paragraph 35 quotes the text of a solicitor's letter to the school in respect of a civil claim, which alleges a wide range of failings in the school's duty of care towards pupils.

Let me quote paragraph 36 in full.

Allowing for the customary tautology in the content of legal pleadings, the allegations set out in the previous paragraph are a formidable menu of complaints. All have been repeated by correspondents to my Inquiry. Many would be avoided or at least made far less likely by a form of governance that removed conflicts of interest, and separated sometimes irreconcilable functions.

And that's it. That's all Carlile has to say in terms of creating necessary safeguards. Get the governance right and everything drops into place with no apparent additional effort.

As far as can be judged from the content of the report, Carlile seems to have entirely failed to notice that the "irreconcilable functions" of protecting the children from harm from paedophile abuse and protecting the school's reputation in the event of a paedophile abuse case are permanently irreconcilable, no matter who the governors are.

Because the two duties are permanently irreconcilable, a decision has to be made to give one duty priority over the other.

It is obvious that the duty of protecting the children from harm must come first, but this requires that governors and staff to some degree act against their own interests and the interest of the school. There is a terrible temptation to find some way of squaring this circle, and the way often found by independent schools is to handle any allegations internally. This can involve any one or more of the following approaches.

• Believing that the allegation is probably unfounded or mistaken, so there is no danger to the child and therefore no need to report anything.
  
• Believing that the child's best interests are served not by having lots of strangers (i.e. police or social services) compound an already bad experience for the child by asking him or her lots of questions about it. As a result, it is decided that a report to the authorities is not in the best interests of the child.
  
• Believing that a staff member, if he abused, is unlikely to do so again now that the first incident is known.
  
• Believing that the problem is specific to that particular combination of child and staff member, and that the problem will not recur if they are separated. The separation can be achieved by ensuring the staff member doesn't teach that particular pupil's class, moving the staff member to non-teaching duties, asking the staff member to leave or asking the parents to move the child.

These aren't hypothetical, all these approaches have been used and justified in other (non-catholic) independent schools. And all these approaches have the extremely convenient effect of not needing any kind of report to the authorities, and so they don't risk any kind of bad publicity for the school. The first time an abuse case happens, the headteacher might genuinely believe he is acting for the best. But in fact he is grossly deluding himself, persuading himself that what is in the interest of himself and the school is also in the interest of the pupils. It isn't.

Then another case occurs, and having not reported the first one, the management find it necessary not to report the second. And so by slow degrees a culture of denial and non-reporting gradually builds up until you have a disaster on the scale of St Benedict's in the 70s and 80s, where there were multiple abusers all active at the same time,  quite probably covering for each other, and all taking advantage of the opportunities available from the knowledge that they wouldn't be reported. I shudder to think how many children in total were abused at the school over the years.

By the time of Pearce's conviction, the St Benedict's safeguarding policy was 11 pages of excuses never to have to report anything. This is not specifically a catholic school problem, even though St. Benedict's happens to be a catholic school. This can happen at any independent school, because the temptations exist for all independent schools. It may be that catholic schools are more prone to this than others, because they feel they have the reputation of the catholic church as a whole to protect and not merely the reputation of the school, but it seems to me this is a difference of degree rather than of principle.

This is why I think Carlile's magic bullet of a change in governance is profoundly wrong-headed. It simply doesn't address the institutional and psychological factors that cause a culture of non-reporting to come into existence and to develop. It is not all about the monks. The change in governance is a good idea, but for reasons quite unrelated to safeguarding.

The only way to be sure of preventing abuse from building up is to make a firm decision from the outset to automatically report everything, withstanding all temptations to the contrary. Everything means everything, even if it seems trivial at the time, and even if publicity will result in short-term damage to the school's reputation. All allegations and incidents. No exceptions.

Carlile Report analysis - 4

Now that Lord Carlile has made his major recommendation, he finally gets down to what his report is supposed to be about, an analysis of the abuse itself. The next section is titled "A summary of historical abuse cases" and covers paragraphs 33 and 34, with a table placed between them..


The title irritates me to start with. Of all serious crime, only child sex abuse ever gets the label "historical". If somebody is arrested for a murder that took place 30 years ago it isn't called an "historical murder". Similarly we don't have historical rapes or historical robberies. Only child sex abuse gains the dubious distinction of being labelled "historical".

For those still trying to obtain justice or to come to terms with what they suffered, the abuse is anything but historical. The phrase I suspect has been coined and is promoted by those who would minimise the importance and effect of the abuse. It doesn't matter any more, it's "historical". The use of this phrase is a significant insult to victims. As somebody who has prosecuted child sex abuse cases, Carlile ought to know better.

The news has mentioned 21 cases by 8 different people. And indeed the table following paragraph 33 has 21 rows in it, and mentions 8 different people.

• Father Gregory Chillman (2 cases)
• Father Anthony Gee (2 cases)
• Father Stanislaus Hobbs (1 case)
• John Maestri (4 cases)
• Father David Pearce (6 cases)
• Mr X (prosecution pending) (1 case)
• Mr Y (teacher) (1 case)
• Father Laurence Soper (4 cases)

The table is somewhat unclear, but it doesn't seem to be the number of allegations brought to Carlile's attention, it appears to be the number of cases which have been brought to the attention of the school in some fashion or other, most generally by means of a civil action initiated by the alleged victim. For instance Pearce merits 5 rows in the table, but the 11 charges he pleaded guilty to in 2009 are all contained within a single row of the table.

Moreover Carlile was well aware of allegations against Father Kevin Horsey (now deceased). His name came up at the press conference and Carlile acknowledged he had received accounts of abuse by him, but he does not appear on the list. Moreover this seems also to have been acknowledged by the Abbey, and a decision has been made to rename the Horsey building at the school.

So the table is not an accurate description either of the number of probable perpetrators nor of the probable number of victims or cases. Carlile has made no attempt to provide any kind of estimate of the probable total number of victims.

The information in the table is extremely minimal. I wouldn't expect Carlile to provide details of the abuse allegations, but I would have expected some attempt at describing the actions taken by the school in response to allegations and where those actions fell short, at least in a representative sample of cases.

Let's take just one row from the table as an example.

Accusation against: Fr. Pearce
Victim: Male pupil
Date: 1992
Allegation received date: 1992
Social Services: Informed
Charity Commission: No
DfE aware: No
Outcome: CPS decided not to proceed

This is very thin. From the dates, we can infer that this was the allegation which led Pearce to "retire" as Junior School headmaster. We are informed that social services were informed, but not who by or when. We could reasonably have expected Carlile to provide some details of the case, not in terms of the details of the allegation itself, but in terms of the procedures which led to the decision to move Pearce from his post and appoint him Bursar instead. The fact that the CPS did not proceed with a prosecution might have any number of reasons which would not affect a balance-of-probabilities assessment that Pearce was a danger to children. And clearly that assessment was made, otherwise Pearce would not have been moved from his post.

These are the details that the abuse victims deserve to have in the report. These are the details which need to be disclosed so that the errors of the past can be clearly identified and therefore be avoided in future. And these are the details which are entirely absent from  the report.

Without knowing past events in sufficient detail to identify the institutional failings of the school and the abbey, we have no means of knowing whether Carlile's recommendations are sufficient to prevent the same failings from recurring in future.

Again, Carlile seems to be going at this as a lawyer, concentrating on cases which have or may come to court, either civil court in respect of claims against the school, or criminal court to determine the guilt or otherwise of the alleged perpetrators.

But good safeguarding practice requires that you should take action to protect children hopefully long before matters get sufficiently serious as to justify a criminal prosecution or a civil claim against the school. I have little doubt that Pearce for instance exhibited a steadily escalating sequence of behaviour until he got to the point of committing criminal offences. But the report is silent on the subject. It is silent on the measures taken or not taken, it is silent on the reasons for this. All Carlile says in the last part of paragraph 34 is the following.

I have concluded that a more modern form of governance, in which the senior teaching management of the school were not effectively under the total control of the Abbey, and with effective procedures for dealing with possible abuse, would have rendered it more likely that abuse would have been suspected, detected, rejected, and the future secured.

That is his conclusion. It might even be true to an extent - a more modern form of governance quite possibly would have "rendered it more likely that abuse would have been suspected, detected, rejected". But he doesn't describe the line of reasoning by which he gets from the rather minimal facts provided to that conclusion.

And it is a pretty dubious conclusion anyway. Secular independent schools have had abuse crises without there being a monk in sight. So his proposed form of governance isn't a magic bullet. He hasn't explained why he thinks the new form of governance will achieve what he claims for it.

He seems to have worked on the basis that since the majority of (known and currently alleged) abusers have been monks, then what is needed is to take governance of the school away from the monks and hey presto all will be well.

But three of the 8 people listed in his table are or were lay teachers, not monks. Teaching attracts paedophiles, because it is an occupation which (like the priesthood) involves trusted contact with children. So, under the old form of governance it wasn't merely monks refusing to shop other monks who were abusing, it was monks not shopping anybody who was abusing, in order to protect the reputation of the school. Protecting a school's reputation is not an action which monks are uniquely inclined to take. Lay governors are prone to it as well.

Carlile Report analysis - 3

I find the next section of the report "Governance of school and abbey" is really very odd. Carlile goes straight into governance issues without even having yet described the extent, nature and duration of the abuse or the institutional failings which allowed it to go on for so long.

Paragraphs 15-19 briefly describe the current governance arrangements, paragraph 20 points out that the arrangements leave all decision-making power in the hands of the monks, paragraph 21 describes the academic staff and the (lack of) support they have from the governance structures.

Paragraphs 22-24 compare the structure with the governance structures of other English Benedictine schools.

In paragraph 25 Carlile describes the school's existing governance arrangements as "wholly outdated and demonstrably unacceptable".

In paragraphs 26 to 32 he makes his proposals for a new governance structure for the school.

There seems to be a good deal of jumping to conclusions here. First of all, the review was supposed to be about abuse and safeguarding against it, and Carlile hasn't even got to the point yet of providing any details about the abuse and who did it, what institutional failings allowed it to continue and how they could be prevented in future. Instead he steps straight in with recommendations about governance.

Those recommendations are basically for there to be a separate charitable trust to run the school, while the existing trust continues to run the abbey, monastery and parish. the new trust for the school will have a relatively large governing body, drawn from a wide range of experience and interests, including monks, staff, parents and pupils. There will always be a lay majority on the board and the chairman will always be a layman.

If Carlile had been requested primarily to conduct a review of governance this would have been fair enough, but he wasn't. He was asked to review the abuse and make recommendations about putting a stop to child sex abuse at the school and making sure it can't start up again

In his governance proposals, Carlile seems to be proceeding from two principles. One is that the present arrangements are outdated (which is true but irrelevant to safeguarding), and the other is described at the start of para 26.

In a school where there has been abuse, mostly (but not exclusively) as a result of the activities of members of the monastic community, any semblance of a conflict of interest or lack of independent scrutiny must be removed.

Those of you who have been thinking of me as being some sort of rabid anti-catholic may be surprised by the next bit: These shortcomings are not limited to monks. Paedophiles will be paedophiles, and the clever ones who can do the most damage will always be attracted to occupations which involve the supervision of children. That includes teaching as well as the priesthood.



In being aware that the Ealing Abbey scandal is part of the wider catholic abuse scandal, and also that in this particular case the majority of the abuses were committed by monks, Lord Carlile seems to have forgotten that abuse can and does happen in non-catholic independent schools as well. So the principles of independent scrutiny have to be applied whoever is given the job of governing the school.


If abuse is to be prevented, or where it can't be prevented, if it is to be quickly detected and stopped, then it is vital that those tasked with governing the school are aware of their responsibilities in this area, and also aware of the inherent conflict of interest involved in running an independent school.

That conflict is simply stated. The publicity of a paedophile abuse case at a school is very bad for business. Independent schools compete with each other for pupils, they are businesses, even though they are usually constituted as charities. So the short-term interests of the school demand that publicity is avoided, and this is best achieved by making sure that nobody outside the school is aware of it, and so there is a great temptation to find ways of not reporting it to the authorities. This temptation isn't unique to monks. So, whether a school is Catholic, Anglican, Muslim or secular, this conflict of interest remains and must be openly acknowledged so that effective measures to combat it can be devised, whoever is running the school.

Having a board of governors with a secular majority doesn't by itself achieve this. It's a good idea in its own right for the general welfare of the school, which quite frankly needs governors with a wider range of expertise and backgrounds. It will even help safeguarding a bit, but the effect will be minor. A school with a secular board can still fall prey to bad safeguarding practices and end up covering up abuses.

It seems to me that Carlile has been going at this as a criminal lawyer rather than as an expert on the dynamics of child abuse in institutional settings. He has of course both prosecuted and defended child abuse cases and that has no doubt been useful to him, but it is no substitute for knowledge of the institutional failings which allow abuse to flourish, and how those institutional failings are permitted to occur. In my view it has also led him to place too much emphasis on those who committed the abuses (which is what he has to concentrate on for the purpose of criminal trials) rather than on those whose job it was to prevent them.

It is a pity that Lord Carlile did not request the participation of an expert in this field as an equal partner in the conduct of the inquiry. I suspect that if he had, a rather different report would have been produced.

That the monks are being removed from control of governance is what grabbed all the headlines in the papers. An anachronistic governance structure is a nice easy target and a recommendation to reform it is obviously sensible.

But it doesn't address safeguarding.

Carlile Report analysis - 2

The second section of the Carlile report, paragraphs 9 to 14, is titled "The evidence in summary, and my approach to it".

Carlile described how in response to a call for evidence and more general publicity, he was contacted by about 100 people who felt they had a contribution to make. He also mentions that he met the Abbot and headmaster as and when he required, the DfE, the ISI, the monastic community, several of the lay advisers, and some former pupils, both those who were aware of abuses and those who were not.

A wide range of abuses have been described to him, but he has decided not to describe them in detail in the report. His reasons are worth quoting directly.

First, and most important, in my judgment for the effect of what may seem at first sight to be less violent abuse may be just as damaging for the victim as more obviously violent or overt acts. Secondly, it would be wrong for a report on such matters to provide reading material for the prurient and worse.

I think Carlile is right in this. It is one thing for victims who want to bring the matter to public attention to contact the papers or TV news and describe their stories, knowing that publicity will result. It is another for people who have contacted Carlile in confidence to have their accounts described even in paraphrase in the report.

Carlile describes the majority of the abuse described to him consisted of physical punishment carried out in in appropriate ways and circumstances and with sexual motives. That is is far as he goes with descriptions.

Carlile says that it is not appropriate to describe one kind of abuse as "more serious" or "worse" than another. While it might be in a criminal sense in terms of the severity of the sentence an offender might receive, the effect on the victim doesn't map neatly onto this. As he says:

The reality, borne out by some of my correspondents, is that the combination of fear, a sense of guilt, repetition, physical pain, revulsion and knowledge of impropriety may have an extremely damaging effect on future life chances whatever the detail of the abuse.

Carlile's allocation of blame, though this is not the primary purpose of the report, is simple.

Primary fault lies with the abusers, in their abject failure of personal responsibility and self-control, in breach of their sacred vows if monks, and for all in breach of all professional standards and of the criminal law. Secondary fault can be shared by the monastic community, in its lengthy and culpable failure to deal with what at times must have been evident behaviour placing children at risk; and what at all times was a failure to recognise the sinful temptations that might attract some with monastic vocations. Fault lies too with the trustees and the School historically, for their failure to understand and prepare for the possibility of abuse with training and solid procedures for unpalatable eventualities.

Carlile is saying, in clear and simple prose, that the monks knew that there was abuse going on, and they did nothing to stop it.

Carlile described his main purpose as follows.

to use the lessons and failures of the past to ensure that such problems are avoided in the future; and to provide structures to give confidence to pupils, parents and guardians, staff, and anybody else with a legitimate interest in the School in the future.

That's an entirely appropriate objective, one which any right-thinking person would agree with.