In newly unveiled shocking footage, about 40 children with learning disabilities and severe mental disorders were seen to have been confined for hours in UK Special School seclusion rooms, typically without food or drink.
Six of the families have agreed for the footage to be shown. They wanted us to reveal the scale and severity of the trauma their children had experienced which they feel they have been misled about.
The videos show pupils, many of whom were non-verbal, clearly in acute distress, and many are seen to injure themselves for prolonged periods.
In the footage seen, the only time staff at the school in Walthamstow intervene once children are inside the rooms is when a boy repeatedly throws his shoes at the CCTV cameras. They race in to stop him, with one teaching assistant apparently striking him.
“It broke my heart,” said the mother of one of the abused children after viewing the CCTV for the first time. “You wouldn’t even do that to a dog.”
Even now government guidance says only that removing disruptive pupils from classrooms in England must be for a “limited” duration and facilities must be “suitable.”
Reports have also found evidence of mistreatment in seclusion rooms at other schools across the UK, One autistic child was kept inside a cage.
Meanwhile, local MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith said the Whitefield School footage “must lead to profound change” and described it as “jaw-dropping.”
Safeguarding expert Elizabeth Swan said it was “easily the worst footage” she had seen.
“You look at the children and they’re being defeated and responding to that treatment with self-injurious behaviour, it’s torture,” she said.
Whitefield School was rated as outstanding until, in 2017, Ofsted discovered the use of bare, padded rooms without windows to seclude children.
But the existence of the CCTV footage did not become public until 2021, when the reporters learnt an investigation had been launched after the discovery of a box of USB memory sticks containing 500 hours of disturbing footage from inside the rooms.
In April, it was revealed that safeguarding investigations commissioned by the school had proven that six Whitefield staff had abused pupils but they were not referred to the government’s Disclosure and Barring Service, which can ban people from working with children, and three of them continued to work at the school.
Jamie’s mother Deborah watched the calming room footage after police formally invited families to view the abuse, following our report in April.
“You saw them open the door, whack Jamie in his back he went flying on the floor,” she said, fighting back tears.
Jamie’s coat and bag were placed inside the room with him. Deborah says this shows that it was “calculated” that Jamie would remain there until the end of the day, even if he calmed down.
She says Jamie suffered his first ever seizure after he began being placed in the calming rooms and believes his treatment directly resulted in his epilepsy.
Stress can contribute to the development of epilepsy or trigger seizures in those with the condition.
Other families told the reporters their children developed PTSD after being placed in the calming rooms. One child’s family said he suffered severe psychological damage and was later detained in a mental hospital because he was at risk of harming himself.
Parents said they complained to the school about unexplained injuries and the use of the rooms but this did not lead to investigation, even though the evidence from the CCTV cameras was available.
“It’s a cover-up from higher up,” Deborah says.
“I don’t see how they could get away with this level of abuse and no-one’s accountable.”
Another family complained after their son repeatedly returned home with injuries to his nose. The CCTV leaked shows the boy punching himself in the nose while alone inside the room.
Months were spent trying to find out who knew about concerns around the use of the rooms and why there was no investigation into the harm suffered by children in the calming rooms following Ofsted’s 2017 visit.
After the rooms were shut down, a review by a director of the trust running the school reported that governors and a staff member from the local council, Waltham Forest, had visited the rooms. But it did not record any concerns being raised at the time.
It was learned that the job of reviewing the CCTV was largely left to a single teaching assistant.
Once a week, she downloaded the footage and compared it with written staff observations before sharing any incidents and concerns with bosses.
But she failed to report many of the 20-plus clips showing excessive force according to a school safeguarding investigation into her conduct, which concluded she turned a “blind eye” to the failings.
It also found that she had abused a child herself by using a pad used for rugby training to push them into the corner of a room. Despite these findings, she was not sacked.
Erizia Rubyjeana
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