The Review into historic child abuse at Whitefield is due out next week, but questions persist about which organisations kept vital evidence, and which didn’t

It is said that the Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review (LCSPR) into child abuse at Whitefield School during 2014-17 finally will be released next week, having taken an astonishing 16 months longer than the official guidance recommends.

However, even at this eleventh hour, research is still revealing new concerns about the existence of evidence relating to the abuse, and the following looks at one significant example.

Since the passing of the Children Act in 2004, all schools in Waltham Forest (as everywhere else) have been required to complete an annual safeguarding audit, referred to as a Section11 after the relevant paragraph in the legislation, and return it to the Town Hall.

As LBWF explains in the audit pro forma which it circulates, the intention ‘is to provide information for the Local Authority, but we believe it can also be a helpful management tool for the school’.

That seems clear enough, and accordingly, in April this year, I asked LBWF, under the Freedom of Information Act (FIA), for the Whitefield Section 11s for the period 2014-17.

 What happened next is a story in three acts.

Act One: LBWF answers

LBWF’s immediate response to me was straightforward, if surprising, given the pro forma already referred to.

LBWF stated that it could not help, because Section 11s ‘are self-assessment documents completed and held by individual schools’ and ‘As such, the information is not held by the Council’.

Accordingly, LBWF recommended me ‘to contact the relevant school directly’.

Act Two: Whitefield answers

So I took this advice and, again using the FIA, asked Whitefield for the same material.

The school replied that providing an answer was fraught with difficulties. Its management had changed several times since 2017. Its data retention policy stipulated that documents were only to be held for six years. And, as it underlined, in its view, a Section 11 was ‘a local authority safeguarding document that schools are requested to complete and submit, therefore they are owned…by the host LA [local authority]’.

Nevertheless, despite these caveats, Whitefield did forward one document, the school’s Section 11 for the year to June 2017.

Yet it quickly became clear that this only added to the sense of confusion.

First, the document which Whitefield sent me was incomplete, omitting 12 of the 31 pages in the original (the page numbers proved the point), with the school commenting that it knew neither why the pages were missing, nor ‘any reason for their omission’.

Second, the school nowhere explained why the 2017 Section 11 alone had survived its retention policy, something that obviously appeared odd.

And third, the Section 11’s contents seemed questionable.

The tenor was upbeat, giving the impression that the school had every one of the appropriate safeguarding policies in place, and parents, carers, and children were always fully consulted and included.

But as later revelations showed, the reality in the six months prior to January 2017 was that children at Whitefield, even younger children, had been locked in the school’s cell like ‘calming rooms’ for long periods of time without their parents or carers being told, and sometimes also subjected to physical abuse.

How did the latter fit with the former?

Act Three: LBWF tries again

In the light of Whitefield’s various claims, I requested that LBWF review its original response to me, and particularly clarify a key area of disagreement – who exactly had legal responsibility for the Section 11s?

However, in a response of mid-June, LBWF Director of Governance and Law Mark Hynes was unmoved, confirming that LBWF held no Section 11s, and providing the following justification:

‘The Council’s position remains that Section 11 audits were self-assessment documents completed by schools in relation to their own safeguarding arrangements…the fact that the documents may have been described as local authority documents does not mean that copies are held by the Council for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act’.

Mr. Hynes then added a paragraph about retention:

‘The Council has also considered whether it was required to retain copies of the documents. There was no specific statutory retention period requiring the Council to retain Section 11 audit documents for the years requested. The relevant guidance indicates that such information should be retained for as long as the local authority needs it to seek assurance about safeguarding practice’.

This appears to confirm that LBWF had been sent the 2014-17 Whitefield Section 11s, but then a Town Hall employee, at some point, had actively decided not to keep them.

Given that the issue of the calming rooms emerged publicly in January 2017, and there have been various different official inquiries into historic child abuse at Whitefield running continuously from 2021 to the present, it would be interesting to know who took the decisions about retention, the specifics of the reasoning they used, and exactly when the Section 11s in question were judged to be superfluous.

To conclude, this story does not inspire much confidence in how LBWF and Whitefield interacted in the past.

More seriously, it also suggests that, if both the school and the council are telling the truth, the LCSPR team has not been able to access what is, without doubt, a potent source of evidence.

And that is something that both could and should have been avoided.