Failings by a school investigating the rape of a nine-year-old by a fellow pupil meant that the attacker was never prosecuted, an inquiry has found.
Published yesterday, the report is the latest in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and examines five facilities as part of its residential schools investigation.
Appletree Treatment Centre in Natland, near Kendal, was one of the centres investigated.
The centre is made up of two independent schools – Appletree and Fell House – and three children’s homes – Appletree, Fell House and Willow Bank – for up to 26 children between the ages of six and 12 years old.
Children in the care of the centre both live and are educated there and have experienced or witnessed violence or neglect and many will have been abused themselves.
The report says that a nine-year-old victim at the centre absconded from the school in November 2006, with two boys aged 11 and 12 years old.
The victim was subsequently raped by the 12-year-old, with the abuse coming to light a couple of weeks later, when a teacher at the school overheard a conversation between pupils discussing the attack.
Staff interviewed the children and informed the local authority the following day.
The local authority and the police both expressed concern that the attack had not been reported sooner and that the children had been interviewed by staff, a Parliament-commissioned independent inquiry into child sexual abuse found.
The victim in this case told a foster parent in 2007 that he was abused “maybe 100 times” by the 12-year-old and other pupils while he was at the school.
No further action
The Crown Prosecution Service decided to take no further action because:
- The 12-year-old attacker had admitted the offences
- There were discrepancies in the accounts
- The young ages and damaged backgrounds of the children involved
- The school ‘interviewing’ the children and contaminating the evidence.
The Crown Prosecution Service stated that, because of the way the school had gathered evidence from the pupils, the court would have thrown it out anyway, if it had gone that far.
Clair Davies, principal of Appletree Treatment Centre since 1995, thought that the 12-year-old’s sexually abusive behaviours had worsened, or had been triggered, after he made a disclosure in October 2006 that his father had sexually abused him when he was a small child but this had not immediately been followed up by his home local authority, Bradford Metropolitan District Council.
The 12-year-old was interviewed under caution later in November 2006 and never returned to Appletree Treatment Centre.
History of absconding
The 12-year-old’s early life had been chaotic and abusive. His father had a previous conviction for a sexual offence against a young child and there had been concerns that he had been sexually abused in a children’s home that he had attended before starting at Appletree Treatment Centre.
Immediately prior to the attacker’s placement decision at Appletree Treatment Centre, he had been excluded from a mainstream school he was attending because he had sexually abused a five-year-old boy in the toilets, and a report written at the time stated that he was developing a pattern of sexually abusive behaviours towards others.
Appletree Treatment Centre agreed to the placement and put in place a risk assessment which stated that the boy should not be left alone with younger children and that there was a risk to younger children from his highly sexualised behaviour.
The inquiry found that the 12-year-old absconded on a regular basis between June and November 2005, and between September and November 2006, often with younger children, including the victim in this case.
There is an increased risk of harmful sexual behaviour when pupils abscond, the inquiry said.
During the time the 12-year-old was at Appletree Treatment Centre, incidents of harmful sexual behaviour between him and younger children took place.
The victim in the case said that he thought that there were many occasions when he had been involved in such incidents. These incidents were described by the victim as happening in the residential accommodation as well as when children absconded from the school site.
The fact that these incidents were happening in the residential accommodation became apparent only when a number of pupils were interviewed by the police following the rape coming to light in November 2006.
The 12-year-old’s social worker recorded that he had told her on the telephone 10 days before the attack that there were only two boys in the unit that he felt he could trust himself with and that he was able to make children run off with him.
At that point, the boy was not attending school because he posed too much of a risk due to the frequent absconding. The conversation with his social worker was reported to centre staff at the time but the next day the 12-year-old returned to school and absconded with two younger children – the victim in this case and another boy.
New foster home
Soon after these events, the victim moved to a foster home where he disclosed the sexually abusive behaviour at the centre. He told the inquiry that the support he had received at his foster placement meant that he could talk for the first time about this.
The inquiry also heard evidence concerning the measures taken to prevent children absconding from the centre in 2006 and subsequently.
In the year following the disclosure in November 2006, there were 11 occasions when children absconded.
In 2013, the Department for Education commissioned an emergency inspection from education watchdog Ofsted, in part to look at an incident where a pupil had absconded and had been at risk.
The inspection was critical of the approach of watch from a distance to allow pupils to cool off. As a result of the emergency inspection, an action plan was put in place and an independent review was commissioned.
Following this, fences around the site were raised.
No children absconded from the site in the six years from 2013 to 2018. There was then a one-off incident in January 2019. Mrs Davies said in her statement that the raising of the fence, in particular, had been effective and in retrospect, she wished the centre had acted earlier.
In evidence, she described that she had not wanted the school to look like a prison and that this had been a factor against taking action at the time.
‘You are the problem’
The victim in the case said that, because he was in a home for children with social, emotional and behavioural problems, he felt he would not be believed. He said: “From the day you’re brought in there, you’re essentially – you are the problem, you are the problem child. So anything that comes out of your mouth is rubbish.”
He also described how being put in a home hundreds of miles from anyone he knew made him feel particularly vulnerable.
Guidance ‘part of the problem’
Triangle, an independent organisation that provides specialist services for children and young people with complex communication needs, was critical of guidance about what to do when a child makes a disclosure of abuse of any kind, describing it as part of the problem.
Triangle set out that much of the available guidance is largely prohibitive, telling staff what they should not do – investigate, ask leading questions, extend the child’s account – but not helping them to help the child without contaminating the evidence.
Report recommendations
The Department for Education and the Welsh Government is required to respond to the findings of this investigation within six months of the publication of the report.
Residential schools
The Department for Education and the Welsh Government should:
- require all residential special schools to be inspected against the quality standards used to regulate children’s homes in England and care homes in Wales;
- reintroduce a duty on boarding schools and residential special schools to inform the relevant inspectorate of allegations of child sexual abuse and other serious incidents, with professional or regulatory consequences for breach of this duty;
- if the recommendation above is implemented, residential special schools will automatically be subject to this duty; and
- introduce a system of licensing and registration of educational guardians for international students which requires Disclosure and Barring Service and barred list checks to be undertaken.
Responding to allegations and concerns
The Department for Education and the Welsh Government should:
- introduce a set of national standards for local authority designated officers in England and Wales to promote consistency; and
- clarify in statutory guidance that the local authority designated officer can be contacted for informal advice as well as when a concern or allegation needs to be referred.
A statement from Appletree Treatment Centre said: “We are currently digesting the findings in the report and we are considering our response.”
