Early in the New Year, the 2013 Ofsted report was published, and the results of the November inspection of Kennedy High School were revealed. Kennedy High had previously always achieved an Outstanding rating, but on this occasion it had been downgraded to Good. I was relieved to see that their incompetence had been recognised in some small way.
In addition to the Ofsted inspection, Douglas Sinclair, the head of child safeguarding in East Sussex, visited me to let me know the key findings of a review into Kennedy High School’s safeguarding policies that his team had conducted. They had found that while the school had safeguarding policies in place, teachers there had consistently failed to follow the correct processes.
I had sent my children to Kennedy High School because I believed it was the best school in the area. Little did I know what was really happening behind closed doors. Through my own research, I had made a number of, frankly, very disturbing discoveries about the school. In 2009, a supply teacher was jailed for seven years after he admitted grooming two girls and having sex with them, and in March 2012, the school’s former chair of governors, Canon Gordon Rideout, was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting young people in the late-1960s and early 1970s. In May 2013, Rideout was found guilty of 36 separate offences at Lewes Crown Court and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.
Jeremy Forrest was number three in a colourful history of offenders working at the school.
On top of that, there was a lot of worrying gossip about other members of staff doing the rounds. It had been alleged, for example, that another teacher, who was no longer at the school, had been having a relationship with a girl around the same time as the Forrest–Gemma scandal, but this was never officially confirmed.
I was also told that another teacher had joked about what had happened to Gemma. Apparently, when one of his pupils was being disruptive in class, he said to them: ‘If you behave, I’ll let you go early, but don’t think I’m going to treat you to a trip to France …’
His sickening words quickly got back to me via friends of Gemma’s. Furious, I couldn’t believe that he would dare joke about something so disturbing. Of course I wasn’t there at the time, so I appreciate that it may well have been that the situation was exaggerated, but it sounded totally believable to me.
I was desperate to find out more about the school. Why hadn’t Kennedy High School reacted more quickly to the concerns raised by pupils when the Forrest–Gemma rumours began? Why hadn’t they tried to contact me with more urgency if the concerns were so worrying? I only lived round the corner, after all.
If I was truly a mother who didn’t care, who didn’t act when they contacted me previously, or who didn’t show an interest in the education of my children, why didn’t they report their concerns to the social services or the police sooner?
Where was the genuine care any parent should expect from a school? How had this been able to happen right under the school’s nose for so long with no one taking any action? Moreover, how had they previously been able to achieve an ‘Outstanding’ Ofsted rating? Kennedy High School continued to publicly declare that they had ‘robust safeguarding policies’, but Douglas Sinclair’s review had shown that they weren’t exactly acting on everything they preached.
There were so many questions swimming around in my head, but I couldn’t focus on them right now. I had a family to look after and now that the East Sussex Local Safeguarding Children Board had confirmed that a serious case review was to go ahead, I had to trust that the full truth would be revealed. I would be expressing my views to the panel for my part in the report and eagerly awaited the meeting I would be called to. More than anything, though, I was waiting for this process to finish so that I could get some answers.