What is the point of the inquiry into historical abuse at Elizabeth College?
Those responsible for carrying out the abuse, or of not being rigorous or curious enough to prevent or curtail it, are mostly retired or dead.
If an abuser is still alive, he needs to be reported not to an inquiry set up and funded by the college, but to the police. The victims’ scars, whether physical or mental, will remain.
The inquiry’s conclusions are predictable – there was a time, long ago, when a handful of miscreants, acting alone, mistreated children to whom the college should now apologise; there was not a widespread culture of abuse but opportunities were missed to intervene and protect students; and the school’s safeguarding procedures today are vastly improved but a few further adjustments are necessary.
The college’s detractors who predicted a whitewash and its champions who think that misdeeds of the past have been exaggerated will both claim to have been vindicated by the findings.
There is cynicism and indifference in this view, put to me the other day by an old friend, but also a certain uncompromising logic.
It is hard not to believe that the chief beneficiaries of the inquiry, which we are told has no budget limit or completion date, will be the safeguarding consultants, lawyers and PR gurus, many based in the UK, to whom the college, still in receipt of nearly £1.5m. a year from taxpayers, will eventually have paid a small fortune.
However, what else was the college to do?
It was faced with enquiries from a group of former students prepared to reveal compelling evidence of sexual abuse in the late 1970s and early 80s. One or two missteps in handling their initial approaches, reportedly dating back years, had not helped create an impression of transparency. Incomplete records made it virtually impossible to mount a robust defence against specific claims. Other allegations of abuse had triggered safeguarding investigations much more recently than the 1980s and further disclosures would be a constant worry.
Over a period of months, as the reputational and legal risks grew, the need for a big move became clear. In the circumstances, a wide-ranging inquiry, placed in the hands of a national expert, was the most orthodox response and the right response.
In April, the college announced that the inquiry would be led by Joanna Nicolas, one of the UK’s foremost experts, who has run independent safeguarding reviews for a host of well-known public and private organisations. It could hardly have made a better appointment. She has said that she was encouraged by the number of former students and others who came forward before the end of June deadline. Since then, nothing has been said about the next steps.
For a school, Elizabeth College often arouses unusually fierce emotions. Some of its critics see it as elitist and exclusionary, resent its immense influence in public life, and believe its very existence unfairly disadvantages the States’ schools. Some of its supporters pretend that almost everything good about education in Guernsey happens at the colleges, fail to see the colleges’ significant financial and cultural advantages, and seem to imagine that Guernsey couldn’t prosper without them. These partisan and unhelpful views afflict every major debate about the colleges’ funding model and education more broadly.
There isn’t an institution which deserves my affection more than Elizabeth College. When I went there as a student in 1992, I remember my parents telling me that the principal had made one promise – the college would discover what made each student tick and encourage those interests to flourish. In my case, they turned out to be writing, history, politics and football, and its many inspirational masters – such as, in those fields, Rick James, John Hooker and Richie Pitt – fulfilled the principal’s promise. I left grateful to a cast of brilliant teachers too numerous to mention without whom I would have accomplished next to nothing at school.
Twenty years later, the college provided our son with a vital escape when a handful of teachers at another school made his life a misery because of his dad’s politics, and was exceptionally supportive of his mum, by then an employee, during a tough time for our family. It is not disrespectful to other schools, all of which achieve great things on their own terms, to celebrate the college’s extraordinary range of opportunities and culture of aspiration. As a parent, I give it 9.9 out of 10, including for pastoral care, and only because nobody is perfect.
I was also twice a member of the Education Committee during a period when the States’ general grant to the college was reduced by 25% in real terms and when its total public funding was cut by 65%. Not out of spite, but because it had been unnecessarily generous, which could no longer be justified when money was needed for long-overdue developments in the States sector, such as funding for pre-school education. In politics I was never an emissary for the college and now, as a journalist, writing about its abuse inquiry, even as an admirer, I am not going to be an apologist for the college.
It is as clear as day that three former students were telling the truth when they recently disclosed to The Observer newspaper that they were among a larger group of boys abused or groomed for abuse by Dr Morley Stuart, who taught classics at Elizabeth College in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The school knew some of the grave allegations against Stuart, who was nicknamed ‘Doc Savage’ by students, and the police became involved on at least one occasion, but he continued to teach there, for a while at least. He left with a glowing valediction – ‘like all the best schoolmasters, he knew his boys and they knew it’, said the college, despite fearing that he was a predatory abuser – and was able to take up a more senior role at a school in Yorkshire which the Court of Appeal later criticised for showing ‘utter disregard for the welfare of the pupils’ and allowing staff to act with ‘virtual impunity’ after several of its former teachers were convicted of sexually abusing pupils in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Stuart was not the only teacher at the college dealt with extremely lightly when abuse was suspected. One problem with Stuart was that he was entertaining boys alone at his home – a red flag even in the 1980s, but the college turned a blind eye to other former teachers taking boys to their homes even into the 2000s, and in this latter period there was at least one incident which led to credible claims of sexually improper behaviour towards students who have thus far declined to make public disclosures. Astonishingly, when I asked as recently as April this year, the college would not say whether or when it had stopped teachers inviting students to their homes.
I was present as a student when, on numerous occasions, a former teacher, now dead, encouraged boys to visit his home. When a student telephoned him early one evening to enquire why he had not kept an appointment for tuition at school, he told the boy he was lying naked in bed and speculated about whether he would wish to see him like that. The teacher was thought of as peculiar, but looking back such behaviour seems alarmingly inappropriate.
Then there was Philip Levi, about whom we are revealing disclosures in today’s paper. Levi was a relentless abuser of young boys, and was convicted of indecent assault in 1985, before he moved to Guernsey and inveigled himself in the youth cricket scene. Whoever recruited him to umpire college matches – or, as the school puts it, matches involving college students – is probably immaterial: these were the days before routine background checks and registers of offenders, and Levi seemed plausible and enthusiastic.
But a man involved with the college at the time who discovered the truth – as cast iron a source as it is possible to imagine – has now disclosed that he reported it to a representative of the school who, showing an apparently astounding level of complacency, said that Levi’s past was already known but he had been allowed to continue volunteering as long as he stayed out of the boys’ changing rooms. The disclosures about him include that he was seen transporting boys between venues. Levi eventually returned to live in England and was jailed for 11 years and three months after pleading guilty to 15 counts of indecent assault on a child aged under 16 and two counts of indecency towards a child aged under 16.
In my experience, the leaders of the college are highly capable, professional and devoted to the success and wellbeing of their students. They can’t be blamed for historical abuse disclosures. They are responsible only for how the school responds today, starting with the inquiry now under way. Admittedly, it is unclear how much of that response is in the hands of the executive leaders and how much is in the hands of the volunteer directors, but either way the school’s response can be guided by its own three values – curiosity, compassion and courage. Curiosity demands complete openness to finding out what happened and why, not just in the dim and distant past, but also more recently, which is inevitably more uncomfortable. Compassion requires putting first the students who suffered – even if, as suspected, they were a small minority – and recognising that they want not just sympathy but explanations. Courage means eschewing self-preservation and accepting that the college as an institution needs to face a reckoning with aspects of its past which will be both painful and unsettling.
Setting up the inquiry, appointing a national expert to lead it and her extensive call for evidence were a good start. I have spoken to witnesses who have provided evidence and been impressed by her approach. Every time the college has been approached with questions, it has replied with striking efficiency and good grace. Less impressively, its announcements of the inquiry laboured the term ‘non-recent abuse’, as if it was restricted to events many decades ago, before this newspaper secured an admission that it was in fact open to evidence almost up to the present day. Since then, the college has refused to publish the inquiry’s terms of reference, or even share them with witnesses, and declined to say whether the findings of the inquiry will be published or withheld from victims and stakeholders. The handling of the inquiry thus far gives cause both for cautious optimism and niggling concern.
It is unrealistic to believe that anxiety about the college’s reputation will play no role in what happens next. Though led by an impartial specialist, the inquiry is not, of course, truly independent – the college set it up and appointed Ms Nicolas; the college is funding it; and the college will decide who sees what at the end of it. That doesn’t make it a superficial or performative exercise. But it does make the need for transparency – more transparency, much more transparency – paramount, if the inquiry is not only to reveal the truth but be seen to have revealed the truth. A strong institution with a well-earned reputation and enduring values will survive the truth and should want nothing less.
