'Boarding schools are amongst the most influential institutions in Britain,
responsible for educating many of our politicians, judges and business leaders,
even three quarters of our prime ministers.
An estimated million people in the country boarded as children.
But it's only now, decades on,
that the true extent of sexual abuse in these schools is coming to light.'
I could smell... the abuse because abuse has a smell
that is a particular smell that you will only know
if you've been abused.
'At eight years old, I was assaulted by a paedophile teacher myself.
My name is Alex Renton.
I'm an investigative journalist and I'm trying to find out
how much the schools knew about what was going on behind their doors.'
"(PHONE RINGS)"
Hi there. I was very keen to talk to you about this character Pilgrim.
I've had people say, "Oh, come on, a little bit of fumbling around,
you can't blame your problems on that."
Well, that's poisonous claptrap.
It's like having a toxin inside you, isn't it?
'I meet survivors speaking openly for the first time
and ask what went wrong in so many of these institutions.'
There would've been a scandal, but having a duty of care, the responsible person was him.
'Were schools really willing to disregard children's safety to protect reputations?
And how did they get away with it?'
I think he kind of slipped justice.
He got off light. He got off light. It's just bloody scandalous, really.
'I meet the families still devastated by the impact of sexual abuse.'
If I could turn the clock back, I would never send him away.
'And most importantly, I want to know, are children in boarding schools today safe?'
In terms of the grooming, the school was complicit.
'I went away to board at the age of nine. The school was always talked about...'
'I cried all night that first night. But the abuse I...'
'As a child, I did think about running away from boarding school. But then I realised...'
'I want to cry, but Mummy said, "You'll love it here. It's what one does."'
'Boarding school. How, for centuries, Britain has educated its elite.
And in 1969, I was sent off to join their ranks.
Ashdown House, a famous boys' prep school in Sussex,
was expected to be the making of me.
My parents weren't to know, would never have imagined,
that in a matter of months I would be sexually abused by my teacher.
More than 40 years have passed, but I still remember the excitement
of my first day at Ashdown House, aged eight.
In reality, I think it was the end of my childhood.'
The first night was terrible. I remember being terrified in a very cold bed,
trying not to cry.
You lived permanently under the threat of violence. You could be beaten for anything,
for talking after lights out, for not doing very well in your Latin prep.
There was a permanent low-level state of fear.
'It was a brutal regime
under my headmaster, Billie Williamson.
You had to learn to live with it. Our new life.
But then there was the sexual abuse.'
Mr Keen was my maths and history teacher in that first year.
My memory of my sexual encounter with him is only once
and it was in the classroom where he usually taught
and I remember very clearly the physical feeling
of being pressed up against him, so the hairy tweed jacket,
while he had an arm round me and his other hand was going straight down the front of my corduroyshorts.
And... And I remember quite distinctly being given
the fruit gum afterwards,
which I knew already was what you got if you submitted to this.
But he was a very violent man, so I'm not sure what submission meant.
I don't think you could've said no.
Sorry.
OK.
It's funny how, you know, however many times you tell it...
'These schools instilled in us a rule of silence
which has kept many boarding school survivors quiet most of their lives.
But in 2013, a group of my former Ashdown House schoolmates spoke up.
They went to the police about a different teacher from later in the 70s,
Martin Haigh, who'd taught science.
I realised it was time to write an article about my own experience of abuse.
It opened the flood gates.
I was inundated with hundreds of e-mails from ex-boarders,
some of them women, but the vast majority men,
detailing abuse at schools up and down the country.
And they were very hard to read.
'You would be just lain across the teacher's lap and your pyjamas pulled down
and there would be some rubbing.'
'He'd mark our books with one hand whilst feeling our buttocks and testicles with the other.'
'I told the headmaster, in so many words,
because I didn't know the word,
that my teacher had raped me.
I never saw him again.'
'There were so many stories of abuse,
I started compiling a database of all the allegations.
And it soon became obvious the story wasn't just about rogue paedophile teachers.
Even more shocking were the schools themselves
and how they failed to deal with allegations of abuse,
and in some cases, allowed it to continue.
Of course, Ashdown House featured heavily,
and several people had written to me about that science teacher, Martin Haigh.
In March last year, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison
for indecent assault and gross indecency
against four Ashdown pupils in the 70s.
One of the men who gave evidence in court,
an ex-Ashdown pupil who was a few years below me, has agreed to meet.
He's asked to remain anonymous.'
When Mr Haigh was first sexually abusive to you, how did that play out?
The first time, erm, he took me to his room for a slippering.
Erm, he pulled my pants down, bent me over his bed and then nothing happened.
And he was just peering very close. I could feel his breath on me.
But it was more his dormitory activity that was really unsettling, as well. What was that?
His activity normally involved the entire dormitory and he would get everybody to take their pants down
and get an erection, quickly,
and then to test the power of the erection, he would get us to hang things off the end of our penises.
While we were doing this, he'd be sort of walking round peering closely
at our bits and pieces.
How did you and the other boys from your year
get round to going to the police?
I think, suddenly, I became, and others, very conscious
about the whole subject matter, cos it's obviously been in the news a lot,
and it stirred up a lot of emotion.
And then there was a sort of coming together of quite a few old Ashdonians
and I think then there was... there was a big motivation, at that stage, to do something about it.
'Martin Haigh said in court that two pupils did tell parents
and they complained to the man who'd taken on some aspects of the running of the school,
this man, Clive Williams.
It was decided no further action would be taken
provided Haigh left at the end of term.
We've spoken to one of those two pupils
who confirmed Martin Haigh's story
that his parents did complain to Clive Williams,
but added he'd also spoken to Clive Williams himself about Haigh's abuse.'
That's what makes me really angry. I feel I'm not so angry with my abuser,
I'm angry with the men in authority. Yeah, absolutely. There'll be all sorts of excuses to this,
reputation of the school, and I think there would've been a scandal.
But having a duty of care, the responsible person was him.
The police have told me that Mr Keen, who abused me and some other boys, as well, is dead.
Mm. We won't get a chance to face him in court.
I'd like to know how that feels. What's it like?
For me, seeing him in court, it was actually my first opportunity
to confront him properly,
and although I was terrified and I was very nervous,
as soon as I got onto the stand, emotionally just changed right there.
It's a shame we didn't do it 30 years ago.
'So, decades on, Haigh finally faced justice.
But because Ashdown allowed him to leave quietly,
he simply found another teaching job,
here at the state-run Chaucer School in Canterbury.
Now former Chaucer pupils are going to the police
with yet more allegations of abuse by Haigh.
The school is now closed, but I decided to contact Chaucer's former headmaster
and he soon sent me an e-mail.'
So, I've been told that the Chaucer School did get a reference from Ashdown House,
sent by the principal, for Martin Haigh.
Blimey.
It was an invitation for a school to take on board
a teacher who was known to...
..be a serious threat... to children.
I'm... I find it quite upsetting.
'I know from my own experience
that Ashdown House had hushed up allegations before
because, as an eight-year-old, I told my mother what my teacher, Thomas Keen, had done to me,
and she took it up with Billie Williamson,
the headmaster in charge while I was there.'
She was persuaded
to take the easier course.
"Calm down. This is nonsense.
This doesn't happen at a lovely place like this and little boys make things up."
So she let it slide. To me, it's absolutely clear
that that sort of operation, conducted by the school authorities,
placating the mother,
sweeping the complaint under the carpet,
was going on again and again.
It seems extraordinary, but clearly avoiding scandal
was more important to them
than keeping children safe.
'We contacted the Cothill Trust,
an organisation which now owns Ashdown House.
They told us...'
'My old headmaster, Billie Williamson, is dead.
But Clive Williams, who later ran the school with him,
told us he has the deepest sympathy for victims, but...'
'But was Ashdown House simply an extreme example?
Just how common was this practice of disregarding accusations of abuse?
And how many more children did that put at risk?'
'As a child, I was assaulted by a paedophile teacher while at boarding school.
I've spent years investigating other cases of abuse in similar institutions,
stories of shame and suffering
pushed under the carpet for half a lifetime.
To think, we were meant to be the lucky ones.
For centuries, boarding school has been the hot house of Britain's ruling class,
a fast track to power and wealth.'
"Young hopefuls arrive with parents and relatives to carry on with that exhausting process of education."
'And a place where the aspirational middle classes
could buy status for their children.'
What's amazing is that boarding schools were run really with very little regulation.
They were often private companies and that allowed them to be run
in often very random and very... bizarre ways.
'Prep schools catered for children from around seven to 13,
designed to feed them into Britain's top public schools, like Eton and Harrow.
Some ex-pupils have happy memories.
Other recall years of abuse, psychological and physical.
All quickly learnt the system's most important lessons.
Never complain. Never show weakness. And never sneak.
And that stiff upper lip stayed in place for decades.
But then Britain's attitude changed.'
Lifting the lid on years of allegations.
Police confirm they questioned Sir Jimmy Savile...
..downfall and disgrace of Max Clifford was completed today
with an eight-year jail sentence. ..abuse by the late Lib Dem MP Sir Cyril Smith...
'The news was dominated by a succession of high-profile abuse scandals,
the floodgates forced open with Jimmy Savile's death in 2011.
And as some of the most famous names in the worlds of television, show business and politics were exposed,
survivors of abuse in more everyday settings
realised that, at last, our stories would be taken more seriously.
Top schools from up and down the country, St Paul's in London,
Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, Gordonstoun in Scotland,
have since seen their names tarnished by abuse allegations.
Simon Bailey leads Operation Hydrant,
which coordinates police investigations into historical abuse.'
Abuse in schools is the most prolific form of institutional abuse
that officers around the country are investigating.
It is almost double that of any other form of institutional abuse.
And, of course, within a boarding school environment, children are sleeping there,
they're showering there once, twice a day, every day,
further opportunities are afforded.
'We've found shocking evidence of the scale of this abuse.
We made a freedom of information request to every police force in the UK
and those that responded told us,
since 2012, 425 people
have been accused of carrying out sexual attacks at boarding schools.
Not every force could provide further details,
but at least 160 people have been charged so far.
And at least 171 of the total
were accused of historical abuse.
Just over half the forces responded,
so the total figure is likely to be far higher.
So while many abusive teachers are finally facing justice,
the hundreds of e-mails I've been sent
show how rarely schools reported them to police at the time.
One abuse victim shared an incredible letter
that his headmaster had sent to his father about his abuser.'
It goes like this.
"He, the teacher, has done a first-class job with the choir
and has taken a tremendous interest, particularly in younger members.
Unfortunately, he has placed himself in a distinctly compromising situation.
For this reason, it has been my painful duty to ask him to leave.
Next term, I shall merely announce that Mr X had to leave for personal reasons. Yours sincerely."
Just astonishing.
It was almost as though this was in the manual of how to run a private boarding school.
That this is how you dealt with scandal and sexual abuses.
This is the system and it's about supporting the system, not protecting children.
Just blatantly arrogant and stupid.
'As kids, these schools failed us in so many ways.
And often, we've kept their secrets.
It takes the average child eight years to open up about abuse.
Imagine the devastation when you've done that and you aren't believed.
In 1975, aged 13, Philip arrived here at Lucton School in Herefordshire,
a school for children aged five to 18.
His housemaster was this man, David Panter.'
Things with me started very early on in my first term.
Our housemaster took it upon himself
to inspect us in the showers.
I was told to bend over and he'd stick his fingers up your bum,
that was to start with, to see if it was clean.
And he used two or three fingers. It was really very painful.
Could you resist? You can't. What are you gonna do?
He would physically restrain you? Yeah, he did.
But that's not where the problem is. The problem is that it starts to become normal.
This is a mental rape.
I think people think that paedophiles force themselves onto children.
It's a lot worse than that.
Because they get you in the brain and they make you want them to do it.
And then it's, "Oh, well, why didn't you say anything?"
At what point did this start progressing?
I would say a few days before the end of term, the first term,
the first time he started masturbating at the same time, in the shower.
So he'd get in the shower with you. And that starts to be a bit weird.
'So Philip worked up the courage to tell the headmaster,
Keith Vivian, what had been happening.'
So you describe it in your own childish way.
And I remember this big hand coming down on my shoulder.
"Now, boy. Now, let's stop telling stories.
Run along to your class. We don't want to cause any trouble, now, dowe?"
And that's how he used to speak. And you get washed out of the door.
So that is actually what happened.
'Panter continued working at the school.
The following year, Philip moved into a dorm for older boys,
away from Panter's clutches.
But three years later, now a school prefect,
Philip was told that Panter was still abusing the younger children.'
This little kid came out of Panter's study
and he came out crying
and... he just said to me, "Panter's fucked me."
And I could smell... the abuse.
Because abuse has a smell.
It's a mixture of semen and faeces and urine and blood.
If you mix those things together,
that is a particular smell that you will only know if you've been abused.
'So Philip went to see Keith Vivian,
the same headmaster who had refused to believe him years before.'
I just said, "I'm not backing down this time. If you don't do something, I'm gonna tell everyone."
And... it was quite interesting
because nothing happened for quite a while... in this last year,
and this carried on and I went back again
with the other house prefect and he got angry with me.
Vivian? Yeah. Got very angry with me. He told me to go away and stop causing trouble.
'But the headmaster finally listened.
By the next day, Panter was gone.'
His wife and him just disappeared quietly away,
no news, no story, no police, no nothing.
And that, effectively, is my story at Lucton School.
'But, again, Panter's teaching career continued in the state sector.
We tracked down the headmaster who employed him at his next school.
He told us he would've received a reference from Lucton.
In 2016, Panter was jailed for nine years
for indecent assault and gross indecency
against seven Lucton pupils.
To avoid a contested trial,
he was only convicted for the crimes he admitted.
He pleaded not guilty to the allegations made by Philip, which he still denies,
as well as the allegations Philip says were make to him by the younger boy.'
So Panter being jailed is not actually the end of the story.
I've heard from Philip and others that the headmaster knew exactly what was going on.
When does he answer for his grotesque failure to not react
and to fail utterly to look after the safety of the children in his care?
'Lucton School told us...'
"..because the school closed in 1985
and a new school was later opened under a trust..."
'The headmaster, Keith Vivian, went on to become a vicar.
He told us he has no recollection of any complaint made by Philip
but does remember when prefects came to him
and says he asked Panter to leave the school premises immediately
and informed the school's governing body.
At no time would he not have acted immediately on such accusations
but it was not a police matter at that time.
Hearing these stories makes me think of my time at Ashdown House
and what became of my abuser, Thomas Keen.
He died in 2005.
I managed to track down a copy of his death certificate.
It said he was a retired teacher.
I'm worried he could've gone on abusing children for decades.'
I do feel a responsibility. We could easily have stopped him.
So we, collectively, put another generation of children at risk
from this violent... evil man.
I feel guilty about that.
'Of the hundreds of abuse stories that are in my database,
some stand out because they echo my own experience.
I've heard from a number of men complaining about a teacher called George Pilgrim
who taught here at St Aubyn's School in East Sussex in the 1970s.'
So, the accounts are pretty much the same.
Mr Pilgrim was one of those teachers who liked to shove his hands into boys' shorts and grope them.
And it left some of them really very troubled.
It's pretty much what happened to me at my school, as well.
'I'm on my way to meet Richard, who was abused by Pilgrim a number of times.'
Richard has said that he doesn't want to discuss the details of what Pilgrim did to him on camera.
I completely empathise with that.
I mean, these are very private matters,
and the fact that they still hurt and corrode
all these years on is a sign of the depth of the impact.
'Pilgrim seemingly had no fear of getting caught.
One day he was abusing ten-year-old Richard in the classroom
when the headmaster, William Jervis, walked in.'
The headmaster was furious. Absolutely furious.
I'd never seen him like that. He was a strict, severe headmaster,
but I was surprised.
And Pilgrim... turned into a little boy himself
and he kind of walked off to his desk and cowered.
And made various excuses.
But it wasn't good enough.
'The incident was never mentioned to Richard again.'
There was nothing asked. There was no sort of attempt to find out
if anything else had happened to me or anyone else.
The school had such a lax, feeble way of dealing with it.
And the feelings of the children were not of any importance.
Well, apparently not,
because there was nothing.
What was its long-term effect on you? Well, I wouldn't recommend it
as a way of developing good self-esteem. Mm.
I've had people say, "Oh, come on, a little bit fumbling around,
you can't blame your problems on that."
Well, that's poisonous claptrap. Mm.
But, erm, it's...
like having a toxin inside you, isn't it? Mm.
It's bound to have an effect.
'But, as I've found before,
Pilgrim simply moved on from St Aubyn's to another private prepschool.
We found that school and it confirmed he'd arrived complete with a reference from St Aubyn's.'
"(PHONE RINGS)"
Hi there. It's Alex Renton here. I was very keen to talk to you about this character Pilgrim."
'The headmaster from the school Pilgrim went on to teach at
agreed to talk with me as long as he remained anonymous.'
So, that's extraordinary.
It's confirmation from the headmaster of the school that Pilgrim went to after St Aubyn's
that he'd arrived there, and within two months, they had to get rid of him.
He was abusing the children in the classroom.
'Pilgrim is dead now and never faced police charges.
It's the same pattern I'm seeing time and time again,
school getting rid of the teacher, doing nothing to stop them abusing somewhere else.
But for the children, entire lives can be contaminated.
Decades on, we found more evidence of abuse at St Aubyn's.
Same school, different teacher.
I've been contacted by the sister of another more recent St Aubyn's student.
His story shows the damage that can be done.
Gavin Purchas arrived there in 1987, aged eight.
He took his own life a couple of years ago
at 37 years old.
His sister, Rachel, has kept the suicide note he left behind.'
"Dear Mum.
You're probably the reason I have lasted so long and achieved so much.
But I am living a nightmare. Six breakdowns..."
'A popular, successful man,
his letter blamed the decision to end his life
on sexual abuse he said he'd been subjected to at school.'
"I will always be with you. Love your boy, Gavin."
'For most of his life, Gavin hadn't spoken of his alleged abuse.
It was only a few years before his death,
after struggling with depression,
that Gavin opened up to his family.
He told them that for two years at St Aubyn's,
he'd been sexually abused by this man,
his maths teacher, Geoffrey Nichols.'
It was under the guise of being given extra lessons and it happened twice a week.
In fact, he hadn't wanted to tell us. I think he thought he should
and afterwards he said he wished he hadn't said anything because he knew it would make us all feel bad
and he didn't want us to feel bad.
I wish that I had gone and taken him out of there.
'Not long after Gavin killed himself,
Rachel discovered that three years after Gavin had left St Aubyn's,
Nichols was jailed for sexually abusing two other boys at the school.'
I then wondered, "Did no one really think it was odd
that a teacher would take small boys to his room?
Was it just something that people didn't...
They really didn't have any awareness of the kind of thing that would go on?"
'In the final year of his life, Gavin moved back home
so his mother could look after him.'
Hello, darling. Hi, Mum. How you doing?
Hi, Ridley! Come on, come in. In you come.
'His room is now a collection of his most precious belongings.'
I always felt he was going to... to recover.
I never gave up hope, not right until the very end.
And...
..erm, I allowed him to be angry with me
because he did feel that, erm,
I... abandoned him when I put him in boarding school.
Erm, but I never abandoned him.
I will never abandon him.
It is one of the things a mother expects to do, is protect her children.
And... I didn't manage to do that.
'The pain of Gavin's death is still raw,
but just as intense is the family's anger at his alleged abuser,
now long out of prison.'
I feel that he murdered my son.
But I don't suppose he looks at it that way.
If I could turn the clock back, I would never send him away.
The anger at what has happened is not just at my putting him in a school,
but it is to put him in a school where he wasn't safe
and this man could do these things to him with impunity.
'We contacted Geoffrey Nichols
and he categorically denied Gavin's allegations.
St Aubyn's closed in 2013,
but the Cothill Trust, which owns the school, told us...'
'But these failures weren't only at school level.
I've discovered this goes a lot higher,
to the very organisations that were meant to ensure high standards.'
'In my research into boarding schools,
I've seen many instances where schools failed to act on allegations of abuse.
But among the hundreds of cases,
one stood out.
It was one of the country's top prep schools, and here the abuser wasn't just a lowly teacher,
it was the owner and headmaster, Robin Lindsay,
whose abuse spanned three decades,
from the 1970s until the end of the 1990s.
The school was Sherborne Prep in Dorset.'
Sherborne Prep is a fascinating case,
and not least because this man, dismissed as a harmless eccentric,
turns out to have been a serious abuser while running the school.
And for a child there, this is the authority figure. There are no governors, no trustees.
So where does a child go?
'Eventually, concerns over his behaviour became so extreme,
the Department for Education held a tribunal in 1998.
Its ruling called Lindsay "a fixated paedophile" and he was barred from teaching.
Just months from retiring anyway,
he never faced police charges.'
So many questions about this place.
How did he manage to go on running this school,
looking after children for so long, when so many questions were raised about him?
'And what was it like to be one of those children?
Today, three Sherborne Prep survivors from the 70s are meeting up for the very first time
to compare memories of their old headmaster.'
I always remember the wash between the buttocks thing in the showers.
Did you have that? When he used to stand there?
He watched all of us shower every day. Yes.
I can remember showers would sometimes, sort of, happen
two, three times a day.
You know, there'd be... And he would always be there.
My littlest brother was there in the 80s
when he used to feel the genitals of the rugby team at the time.
He jumped into bed. He was going crazy.
If you got injured, or any risk of it,
he would be there rubbing embrocation
onto any part of your body. There was the one time when I ended up on his own bed in hisbedroom,
stripped.
And to this day, I've got this image of him with flaring nostrils,
staring at my groin, rubbing it.
And I was just frozen there in fear.
And I get that image every day.
'For Gilo, his worst memories are what happened to him
as a ten-year-old after lights out.'
He'd come and stand in the middle of the dorm... Mm.
..for long, five, what felt like five, ten minutes,
to check that everybody was asleep.
You could tell that he was around at night because of the fug that kind of...
The smell of revolting tobacco.
Oh, God. You were aware of his presence.
And the back rub... thing would start.
And I still remember very, very powerfully and distinctly
when that back rub became him masturbating over me.
I didn't understand what was going on
but I knew that I was being held down with one hand.
That he told me not to turn around.
And that became a pattern for the next year.
Did any of you at the time attempt to tell your parents?
I did try and tell my mother, and she just said, "Oh, no, it can't possibly be. No, no, no."
And that was it. She just dismissed it? Yeah. Dismissed. It wasn't happening.
'Incredibly, it was another two decades
before the independent schools tribunal into Sherborne Prep
finally forced Lindsay out in 1998.'
You must feel angry on behalf of those children who came after you.
I feel sad that for three decades that went unchecked.
When he was retired, there was 700 people in this service in the abbey
gave him, er, three cheers.
Even today, there are people who believe that he's maligned.
I think he kind of slipped justice...
..really. He got off light. You know, he got off light.
It's just bloody scandalous, really.
'We've discovered that the opportunity to stop Lindsay
first arose 14 years before the authorities acted.
In 1985, a whistle-blowing teacher from Sherborne Prep
went to IAPS, the Association of Prep Schools.
A school's membership of this umbrella group was meant to be a guarantee of highstandards.
They investigated and said he'd behaved foolishly and indiscreetly,
but according to the later tribunal ruling,
did not take strong or effective action against him.
It seems shockingly complacent.
So I took a closer look at who sat on the IAPS board back then
and I realised two of the headmasters on there were already known to me,
including its chairman, Robin Peverett.'
They were absolutely the wrong men to be looking into abuse at a prep school.
There's Robin Peverett, later convicted of sexually abusing his own pupils.
And there's Robin Lindsay himself.
It's extraordinary.
'Despite the serious allegations against him,
Lindsay remained on the IAPS board for another two years.
And it was another eight years before inspectors again visited the school,
this time from Dorset Social Services.
Our freedom of information request revealed a report with a catalogue of paedophilic behaviour.
Children complaining of Lindsay's supervised showers,
his interest in watching their naked bodies,
close hugs with the stench of cigar smoke.
Most incredibly was the account of one boy
who claimed he was sexually molested by an intruder
wearing a wig and stinking of cigars.
The headmaster told him it must have been a dream.
Robin Lindsay died in 2016.
We've managed to track down one of the few people who can explain
why he never faced police charges.
Jill Donnell was the Chief Superintendent at Dorset Police
and she oversaw the investigation into him in 1993.'
I remember this case over the many, many cases,
over the many, many years I worked in the police,
for the challenges that we had getting the evidence that's necessary.
And in the case that we're talking about,
the main place that evidence is gonna come from is from children.
And what was the reaction of the parents when you went to try and talk to these children?
I'm sad to say that the majority that I spoke to were very hesitant
and some of them very clear they were not going to let us talk to the children.
And it was said to me on more than one occasion that the most important thing for theparents
was that their children went to the required public school
and that anything that was done to endanger that they weren't terribly supportive of at all.
So their academic careers were more important than their safety.
Yes. Their priority was about the future of their children
and not what may or may not have been happening to them at that time.
'Sherborne Preparatory School told us they have sympathy for any victims
and said it takes the welfare of current and former pupils
very seriously.
But as they bought the school from Lindsay in 1998,
it is now an entirely different
legal, financial and governance entity.
It is therefore unable to comment on any of the issues raised.
On their failure to take effective action against Lindsay,
IAPS, the Independent Association of Prep Schools,
simply told us they are appalled by the events of the past.
Today, the education, care and welfare of young people
is their primary concern and they demand the most exacting standards
of themselves and their schools.
As a journalist, and as a survivor,
I know the lifelong damage abuse can cause.
But as an adult, I've never looked an offender in the eyes
and asked them, "Why?"
Today I'm on my way to meet James,
a former prep school teacher and a paedophile.'
The teacher who sexually assaulted me is dead, so I won't get the chance to ask the questions I want to ask.
But there are universal questions I need to ask
for me and for the thousands of people like me who were abused.
'James has served time in prison for sexual assaults on children in the 70s and 80s.
His views are shocking but shed light on the culture
that allowed sexual abuse to become almost accepted.'
I was sexually abused by not one master but by five when I was at prep school.
It's never done me any harm.
They made my life so much more pleasant... in various ways
that I accepted it.
I was getting something from them that I wasn't getting from my parents.
Er, Dinky toys, cigarette cards, whole sets,
the love and affection which I was deprived of at home.
When you got the job, were background checks done on you?
None whatsoever. No. And that was normal at the time? Yes. Yeah.
And when you arrived there,
were you aware that there was...
unorthodox relationships between the teachers and the boys?
At least two of my predecessors had been dismissed for...
..intimacy with the boys, shall we say.
And then after about the first year,
erm, I learned that the deputy headmaster,
erm, was also intimately involved with a number of boys.
And when you say "intimate relationship," what does that mean?
It's a simple case of a master
literally falling in love with an attractive boy.
'I find this very hard to hear
and I'm particularly horrified to discover he believes
his first victim had actually wanted to be abused.'
It was the boy that instigated the actual, erm, intimacy.
He approached me one day
and... suggested that I did something to him.
Simple as that. And that's not unusual.
That was to perform a sexual act? Yes. Yeah.
The initial boy we've been speaking about was ten years old, 11 years old, I think.
He was, well, he was nearly 12. He was nearly 12. Yeah.
Erm, do you feel... he gave consent?
Yes.
How can one know that with someone that age?
(LAUGHS) Good question.
A 12-year-old boy
is just as capable of giving consent
as any other age.
'For a survivor like me, it's upsetting to hear a paedophile
convince himself that his victim can be complicit.
It is one of the cruellest and most damaging aspects of abuse.'
Do you think what you've described
is still going on in boarding schools today?
My guess is that, yes, it is.
Because it is traditional.
I know you won't like that word.
But it is traditional. It has been going on for generations.
'Our evidence suggests it would be naive to believe boarding schools
no longer hold appeal for predatory paedophiles.
Our freedom of information request to every police force
revealed that since 2012,
at least 125 people have been accused by children
of recent sex attacks at boarding schools.
And there are at least 31 ongoing investigations.
So it's vital schools today take their duty to protect children seriously.
But many say there's still confusion
over what schools must do if they suspect abuse.
The government tells schools they should report abuse allegations to their local authority.
So we also made an FOI request to every local authority in England and Wales
and found that since 2012,
404 allegations of sexual abuse
were reported by boarding schools.
But there were glaring differences in reporting figures.
One council, responsible for 19 boarding schools,
had received 60 complaints.
Another, with 20, just two.
Perhaps that's down to one startling fact,
that schools in the UK are still not legally obliged to tell the authorities.
Caldicott School in Buckinghamshire
saw several of its former teachers convicted for abuse in the 1970s.
Tom Perry was the first complainant in the scandal
and now campaigns for the reporting of abuse to be made legally mandatory.'
Do you think things are different at boarding schools nowadays?
Erm, I don't see how they can be.
In simple terms, when I was abused, and when you were abused,
there was no requirement to report abuse. Today, there is no requirement to report abuse.
If you can spot a difference in there somewhere, let me know.
But the current rules, the statutory guidance,
say you should report suspicion of a known or suspected abuse. Yes. Is that not enough?
Yeah, but look, I should lose weight and drink less. There's no-one to hold me to account for it.
It's exactly the same in child protection in these settings. The whole thing is absurd.
'I showed Tom the results of our FOI request.
Could the lack of a clear legal requirement
explain the vastly different reporting rates to the local authorities?'
It doesn't add up. It could be lack of referrals.
It could be schools saying, "No, no, no. We'll deal with this in-house."
'Of course, all schools are expected to have sufficient safeguarding arrangements
to prevent abuse in the first place.
These are checked in regular inspections.
We've looked at the most recent inspection report
for every boarding school in England.
Depending on the rating system used by each different inspectorate,
when it came to safeguarding, one in ten schools either failed to meet national standards,
or else didn't meet the requirements needed
to be given a rating of "good."
So what is the industry today doing to protect children?
Are cases being referred to the authorities?
And why have so few schools publicly apologised to survivors?
Today I'm meeting with the Boarding Schools Association, which represents 90 percent of boarding schools.'
Can you, hand on your heart, say the grotesque failures and abuses
that we saw really not very long ago are impossible today?
What I can say is that everyone who works in boarding today
is professional, caring and doing everything they can
to make safeguarding their number one priority.
There's no doubt that there was a period
where some people at some schools experienced some appalling abuse. And it's absolutely shocking.
But in my experience, there isn't any school out there
which doesn't want to listen to victims
and, where it can, as quickly as possible say sorry.
I'm not sure about that. There seems to be another colder-hearted consideration comingin,
which is that schools don't want to apologise
for fear of having to pay compensation.
I don't know individual cases or the individual schools.
And you're obviously in touch with survivors who are telling you a differentthing.
Compensation arrangements would be a matter between a particular survivor and a particular school
and we couldn't comment on that.
'Last year, the BSA finally issued rules
telling its members they must report any allegations of abuse,
but say it's time for the government to make that law.'
It's the only system which can properly work.
Because why would you not have a system where people are required to reportabuse?
So remove any doubt, remove any ambiguity,
and let's have mandatory reporting, and that ultimately contributes to making children safer.
'Other leading organisations, like the NSPCC,
IAPS and the Independent Schools' Council,
have told us they too support mandatory reporting for boarding schools.
We asked the government about this. They declined an interview
but said that in 2016, they held a public consultation about whether it should be introduced
and they will publish its finding in due course.
But how long can we wait while abuse and grooming still goes on in schools?
I've been contacted by Matthew, who only left school this decade.
As a teenager, he boarded at one of Britain's most prestigious institutions
and was sexually assaulted by a teaching assistant away from school premises.'
I went back to school the next term and I told him
that I didn't want him to contact me.
Like a boomerang, he came back into my life.
He told me that if I told anyone about this case,
they would just say that I was gay to everyone in the school.
And he just got increasingly controlling
over being in aspects of my life.
And what kind of things was he doing?
So, he was taking me out to restaurants.
He got to know my friends through, kind of, social media.
I had over 120 mutual friends with him on Facebook
by the time I'd left the school.
There were instances where he got me to go back to his, like, flat.
And I was just there by myself.
So he would invite you back to his room at the school.
I mean, was that normal for teachers at the school? Could they do that to children?
Not on a one-on-one basis.
The rules were, for some reason, didn't seem to apply to him.
How obvious was his behaviour?
Retrospectively, it seems really obvious.
'His abuser's behaviour clearly broke the school's own safeguarding policies.
But his actions seem to have gone unnoticed.
They even promoted the man to become a teacher.'
Did you ever think of telling anyone at the school?
There genuinely was not anyone who was suitable at the school
for me to tell. First of all,
I wasn't sure about the procedure that would be involved.
I didn't know whether I would have to leave the school.
I didn't know whether teachers would believe me.
'Matthew went to the police a couple of years after he left the school.
His abuser has been jailed.'
Do you blame the school for what happened?
In terms of the incident of assault, I don't blame the school.
But in terms of the grooming, the school was complicit.
'Matthew's school was inspected six months after his teacher was arrested.
It was given a rating of "excellent" for safeguarding.
So parents and pupils would have no way of knowing
there had been allegations of a breach at the school.'
People say that these things could never happen in a school today. Do you agree with that?
People are very happy to pat themselves on the back
when this is labelled as historic or it wasn't under this leadership
and things have changed.
I think that mentality diverts attention away
from thinking dynamically about how abuse can exist in the 21st-century.
'It's been four years since I first wrote about my time at Ashdown House.
Today I was meant to meet with its owners to hear how things have changed.
In the end, they decided against the interview,
but said I could still visit my old school.'
Coming back to Ashdown doesn't feel good.
I spent five of the formative, most miserable years of my life here.
And it's somewhere that still appears in nightmares.
'My school, like so many others,
has never formally apologised for what happened to us under their care,
keen to distance themselves from these abuses of the past.
Perhaps that is part of the problem.
Because if we never truly acknowledge our mistakes,
how can we learn from them?'
Since I first wrote about the abuse at this school and many others,
I've heard so many stories of misery, of real horror.
And it was chiefly because they didn't listen to me,
to my friends, to all those schoolchildren then.
And I really hope now that this story is historical, that children are being listened to today.
Because if they're not, then these same crimes
can be committed with impunity.
We have to listen to children. It's the only answer.
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