Allegations Against Staff – 1. Introduction
Allegations against staff are not a new issue. The Clywch Report in the early 1990s investigated concerns surrounding John Arwyn Owen, a drama teacher at Ysgol Gyfun Rhydfelen, which dated back to 1980.
As a result of this inquiry, whistleblowing policies were introduced, alongside mandatory child protection training for staff and governors.
The Welsh Government’s current guidance on handling allegations against staff can be found in the document “Safeguarding Children in Education: Handling Allegations of Abuse Against Teachers and Other Staff”.
Video Transcript
I wish I could say that due to the reviews that have occurred into professionals abusing children or adults, whether this be Harold Shipman, Jimmy Saville, Clywch Report that you’ve read about. But it hasn’t unfortunately. Even the Child Practice Review into Neil Foden, the headteacher in Ysgol Friar’s in Bangor.
Unfortunately, it’s the same mistakes happening over and over again. That’s why we always have to think the unthinkable. We have to imagine that anyone that we work with could be an abuser of children or adults. And one of the things I remember sticks in my head was, I attended a session with Karen Leach. Karen Leach was an Olympic swimmer for Ireland, and one of the things that she said was that the worst thing we can do is to label these people as ‘monsters’, or use other phrases.
Because, at the end of the day, these are people that are respected within our society, these are people that walk in our community, that we see on a day to day basis. People do not have labels. If we tried to spot them, we would not, and believe me I’m talking from personal experience here. Where, unfortunately, one of my best friends’ husband was actually charged with producing and distributing sexually explicit images of children. And I had no idea.
So, it is really, really important that we do keep looking out for signs, seeing what we can see. In the ‘Safer Recruitment’ module, we talked about how to try and stop people before they even entered into your school.
By making sure and showing we’ve got this attitude of ‘safeguarding is our business’, ‘it’s really important here’. But we have to accept, there are going to be people that get through that net and will be in our school settings. And they don’t just groom the individual, they groom the staff as well, into complying with them.
We’ve even had examples in some of the cases which I’ve looked at in Farrer and Co, which we’ll talk about in a minute, where parents actually put a petition together to get that staff member back. Because, unfortunately, whilst investigations are ongoing, schools are unable to comment, they’re unable to share details with parents, saying what was going on, why that member of staff isn’t in school.
And, as I said, that case where parents were petitioning to get that member of staff back that had abused their children. So, please very much, have that attitude, think the unthinkable. It could happen here.