By Jane Foster Sarre

This article sets out the key lessons we learned as part of a recent serious case review. If you’d like to learn more about this, join me on 20th January at the CIS Deep Dive Workshop: Adult Conduct Concerns, where I’ll be presenting these findings.

Serious case review

In 2024, a UK Headteacher was convicted and jailed for the sexual assault of four girls who had attended his school. It was a high-profile case, attracting a lot of media attention, partly due to the Headteacher being known throughout Wales as someone who was outspoken about education issues and influential in local and national politics.

He had also attracted attention UK-wide when he made an announcement that no child attending his school whose parents had an outstanding lunch bill of more than one penny, would be provided with food in the school.

Following the headteacher’s conviction, a serious case review was commissioned by the local safeguarding authority in July 2024. This was completed and published in November 2025.

The Review, ‘Our Bravery Brought Justice’, a name chosen by the survivors, reflected that it was the courage of children who brought the case to court, not of the adults who had been charged with safeguarding them.

The Review reported 52 missed opportunities (and there were no doubt more) for adults to intervene and challenge the abuser’s inappropriate interactions with children. Singly, those interactions, though inappropriate, may not have met the threshold of abuse, but together formed an alarming pattern of adult conduct concerns.

These rule-breaking behaviours developed and escalated over time, and the longer they went on, the more difficult they were to challenge.

Findings from the review

The Review identified the key factors which had prevented the abuse from being recognized.

• Each report was treated as a single incident and viewed through the lens of the accused adult being at risk of malicious allegations made by children.
• Many of the concerns were raised by professionals (both education and other agencies) who had observed his behaviours when working with vulnerable children.
• The children themselves did not raise concerns, but no one went to speak with them about what had been observed by other adults.
• Adults who had seen the headteacher taking children in his car and having (the same) lone children in his office on repeated occasions, made no formal complaint or referral, although they did WhatsApp each other to say that they were ‘worried’.
• Record keeping was extremely poor. When decisions were made that ‘someone’ should speak with the headteacher about ‘boundaries’, there was no record of who the ‘someone’ should be, whether anyone spoke to him or what the outcome was. He was allegedly spoken to at least 20 times about his behaviour. 
• No one challenged or questioned his motivation to take on the role of pastoral lead (counsellor role..) with no qualifications in the field and in spite of his running the largest school in his local area. Nor did they question his removing qualified staff from the pastoral team and replacing them with unqualified and inexperienced staff.
• No one stepped back to reflect objectively on why a man in his 60s would accompany a child to a gynaecological appointment.

This Review identified that this was a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to make significant changes to safeguarding in education, and to ensure that there was sufficient finance available to make this succeed. 

Key learning points for schools

Whilst this was a review based in the UK, the learning is significant for international schools.

The implementation of most of the recommendations does not have significant funding implications for an individual school or indeed group of schools. It is more a matter of changes in mind set and in some practices.

These are the key learning points. 

1. When there is a concern about an adult’s interaction with children, a trained professional should always speak with the child, even if they have not made a complaint.
2. Children must be supported to understand what is, and what is not appropriate conduct for and adult working with them, and to learn in a culture where they are able to speak out without fear if an adult makes them feel uncomfortable.
3. Adults working with children should be trained to ‘think the unthinkable’ not ‘what if I am wrong, but what if I am right?’
4. All adults working with children need to have some understanding of the modus operandi of sex offenders, their grooming techniques and to recognise that that minor boundary breaches, even of matters unrelated to safeguarding, can be indicative of a person abusing children. 
5. All schools are recommended to develop an ‘adult conduct concern’ policy which facilitates reporting, recording and oversight of patterns of concerns in an environment which is safe for the reporter. This is in addition to and does not replace the school’s code of conduct. It could however be part of their Managing Allegations Policy or Child Safeguarding Handbook.

If you would like know more about this case you can review the report here: Our Bravery Brought Justice. 
 

Key questions this post answers:

1. What are some practices schools can implement to improve safeguarding and ensure the safety of children?
2. Why is it important for trained professionals to speak with children when there are concerns about an adult's behaviour, even if the child hasn't made a complaint? 
3. How can schools foster a culture where adults and children feel empowered to speak out if they experience or observe inappropriate conduct?