Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, Ofsted was asked to conduct a rapid review of sexual harassment and abuse in schools and colleges in England after thousands of harrowing testimonies detailing sexual abuse and misconduct in schools were posted on the Everyone’s Invited website this year. I was last teaching full-time in 2016, when these problems were emerging, but nothing was evident on the scale that has erupted in the past couple of years.

Inspectors visited 32 unnamed schools and colleges in both the independent and state sectors, including a number named on Everyone’s Invited, and spoke to more than 900 children and young people. Nine out of 10 girls and half the boys who took part in the review said that being sent unsolicited explicit pictures or videos happened

“a lot or sometimes to them or their peers.”

A similar proportion of girls—92%—and three-quarters of boys complained of recurrent sexist name-calling. The report said:

“The frequency of these harmful sexual behaviours means that some children and young people consider them normal.”


Although the review focused mainly on secondary school-aged children, inspectors went to two primary schools and found that there were already concerns about children viewing porn and inappropriate images on social media.

Ofsted wants head teachers to take a whole-school approach and develop a culture where all kinds of sexual harassment are addressed and sanctioned. It calls for sex education to allow sufficient time to cover consent and sharing explicit images, and it urges the Government to take the findings of the review into account as they develop the online safety Bill. Ofsted tells us that this is a cultural issue; it is about attitudes and behaviours becoming normalised. Schools and colleges cannot solve that by themselves. The Government need to look at online bullying and abuse and the ease with which children can access pornography.

The Ofsted report echoes the findings of a landmark report by the Commons Women and Equalities Committee in 2016. I simply ask the Minister: why has nothing happened since then? How can we be sure that real change will come about after the Ofsted report? We have had reports in the past and nothing has happened, so what is different now?

Earlier today in the education debate—eloquently led by my noble friend Lady Morris—I spoke about an outstanding report published yesterday by the Welsh Labour Government on their plans for education recovery in Wales, which puts learners at the centre. It is called Renew and Reform: Supporting Learners’ Wellbeing and Progression, and I again recommend it as essential reading.

Yesterday also saw the publication by Minister Jeremy Miles MS of a written statement on sexual harassment and abuse in education settings in Wales, and I sincerely offer the following suggestions to this Government from the Welsh Government’s review. The Minister will request Estyn, our Ofsted, to conduct a review into culture and process in schools to help protect and support young people better. While the findings of that review will play an important role in supporting settings and informing government policy, the Minister recognises that we cannot await the outcome of that review before he acts, so he expects that every school and local authority should have a designated lead responsible for supporting learners with relationships and sexuality education.

The Welsh Government have published extensive guidance on preventing and responding to child sexual abuse, including their statutory guidance, Keeping Learners Safe. Furthermore, they have published violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence guidance for school governors and a toolkit for education staff containing best practice, as well as supporting the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales with the development of its strategy. The Welsh Government’s National Action Plan Preventing and Responding to Child Sexual Abuse has 10 objectives, including objective 2:

“Increased awareness in children of the importance of safe, equal and healthy relationships and that abusive behaviour is always wrong.”


Working with regional safeguarding boards, they are implementing the plan with the view that more must be done. I once again offer the UK Government, via the Minister, the opportunity to learn from what devolved Governments are already doing in this extremely difficult and sensitive area.

I have a series of questions for the UK Government. Will they now commit to using the online safety Bill to tackle the forced and unwanted sharing of nude photos and other online harassment? What support will the Government provide to schools to create the whole-school and whole-college approaches to tackling sexual harassment recommended by Ofsted? Does the Minister agree that the Office for Students’ recent Statement of Expectations falls short of the action needed to tackle the estimated 50,000 incidents of sexual harassment and abuse taking place on university campuses each year? Something must indeed be done.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges, and I am pleased to hear the Government’s response.

I have been raising much of what has been highlighted in the review for many years in this House. Countless parents have contacted me to tell me about the sexual abuse and harassment that their children have had to face in schools. Some children as young as four have been sexually assaulted by children as young as 10. Teenage girls have told me about the aggressive sexual abuse that they have had to face for more than 10 years now. Many have felt ashamed about what they have been asked to perform, and they have even resorted to self-harm and experienced suicidal thoughts.

So nothing in the review has come as a surprise to me or to many teachers across the country in both public and state schools, as well as in colleges and universities. Many signed an open letter that I wrote to the Prime Minister just last month, highlighting our concerns at the epidemic of sexual abuse fuelled by online pornography. Let us give a thought to all those who have been affected.

The review by Ofsted rightly has a strong emphasis on education, and the PSHE Association has long recommended that best practice for RSHE is for it to be delivered as part of a spiral PSHE curriculum that builds children’s knowledge and skills and contributes to supporting them in navigating their social worlds both now and in future. That requires timetabled lessons, trained teachers and accountability through inspection bodies. What commitments are there from inspectoral bodies, including Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate, to inspect PSHE, including RSHE, to the same standard as they would inspect other curriculum areas, including Ofsted ensuring that PSHE is inspected within the “quality of education” element of its inspection framework? It is vital that schools provide evidence of their three Is—intent, implementation and impact—as they would for history, maths, science or any other curriculum areas.

The current training modules released by the DfE are widely criticised by teachers due to their focusing on simply imparting factual knowledge to teachers. PSHE and RSHE can be dangerous if taught by teachers who are undertrained and underprepared. Will the Government commit to training that demonstrates effective improvement of teachers’ confidence and competence in teaching RSHE? If the DfE is not able to provide this training, will the Government ensure that schools have funding and teachers’ time to enable it to be available from reputable organisations that have the expertise and experience to equip our teachers?

The Government must ensure that there is guidance that PSHE, including RSHE, is delivered in timetabled lessons of the same length as lessons for other curriculum areas. So-called drop-down days sporadically placed throughout the year cannot be relied upon in schools, because the topics covered are highly sensitive. A whole day spent on such topics could re-traumatise students so much that we have to be careful. Will the Government put guidance in place for school leaders, to ensure that they support their PSHE leads by providing them with time to teach PSHE, time to plan and time to lead and train their colleagues?

I am pleased that the review focused on pornography. Right now, we have on the statute book legislation that Parliament passed four years ago which does two things. It prevents children accessing commercial pornographic websites through age verification and makes provision for the regulator to take robust action against any site showing extreme pornography which normalises violence against women. As the Government reflect on their next steps, they would be well advised to review their decision not to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which should have been in place 18 months ago. In October 2019, the Government performed a spectacular U-turn, saying they were going back to the drawing board and starting again with completely new legislation. It was only last month that we saw that alternative draft Bill.

I know that Part 3 does not address pornography on social media, but it addresses pornographic websites. Importantly, research published last month on the viewing of online pornography by 16 and 17 year-olds states that

“pornography was much more frequently viewed on pornographic websites than on social media, showing how important the regulation of such sites remains”.

We need regulation to deal with pornographic websites and pornography on social media. That is why both Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act and the online harms Bill are so important. To use the fact that Part 3 does not deal with pornography on social media as a reason not to implement the legislation that we have already passed is quite absurd, especially as the draft Bill has not even started pre-legislative scrutiny. It will be at least three years, and probably four to five, by the time the online harms Act and its attendant legislation and regulator are ready to deliver—significantly longer than it would take to implement Part 3. Let us do it.

I welcome the fact that the Government have committed to work to

“identify whether there are actions that can be taken more quickly to protect children before the Online Safety Bill comes into effect”.

This is music to my ears. Without age verification now, preventing young people viewing pornography is like trying to get a drug addict off heroin while at the same time giving them heroin. We are in a place where we can take robust action in relation to pornographic websites immediately, as an interim measure, while we develop the best possible online harms Bill to address the growing social media challenge. Will the Government do so for the sake of our young people and take action to halt this scourge on society and young minds now?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses for their contributions and for outlining the common theme of the questions I have been asked about the RHSE curriculum. In fact, we have been acting on the WESC report from 2016. That was the beginning of the development of the new curriculum, which was updated from the 2000 curriculum. We have been working very hard since 2016, so the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, can be reassured that we have taken action and have been developing that curriculum. We responded to the contributions from teachers that they wanted resource and help. There is a portal for teacher resources, and various webinar-type training sessions have been run as well.

Even though we have all lived through the pandemic, the RHSE curriculum, which is compulsory in all schools —private, independent and state-funded—was brought into effect in September 2020. We gave schools some flexibility about how they introduce it—for instance, there has been a requirement for them to consult with parents on the curriculum and the resources during the pandemic—but as of September this year they need to be delivering that curriculum. A great deal of work and effort has gone into developing appropriate support for teachers, but we recognise that Ofsted’s review asks us to go even further, saying that teachers do not have the confidence to teach this curriculum, so we are working to see what more we can do on the portal and to support teachers to deliver this curriculum.

I am pleased to learn from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted will now be doing a review following the publication of the Ofsted review. I thank Her Majesty’s chief inspector and her team for doing such a swift and thorough review, and I thank the 900 young people who took part, talking to the team and discussing matters that were perhaps not the easiest to discuss.

The Government have responded to feedback on issues of peer-on-peer abuse going back to about 2016, when schools responded to the annual Keeping Children Safe in Education consultations by saying they were not confident in dealing with the issue of peer-on-peer abuse manifesting particularly in sexual abuse and sexual harassment. We updated the guidance: there is now a chapter on this particular matter, and there is stand-alone guidance on peer-on-peer sexual harassment and sexual abuse in schools. We have developed that as a response to the sector. Although the Ofsted review makes recommendations relating to the other statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, there was no specific requirement, because we have been working hard with the contribution of the sector year on year.

As I said, the guidance is out for consultation each year—one year for technical consultation and the next for substantive review. We have responded to that. That is not to say there is not more we need to do. There are issues around the low-level concerns, and that spreads beyond the peer-on-peer abuse and into workforce/children issues: what do you do when you have low-level concerns that are below the threshold for report? How do you deal with those disciplinary matters? We will be looking at low-level concerns.

On the issues to do with online safety, the online safety Bill will, of course, come with pre-legislative scrutiny, so noble Lords will have an opportunity to look at that in detail. The Secretary of State has also asked the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, to specifically look at the issue of access to pornography. I will take back specific questions on Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which I was not, unfortunately, familiar with, to see about that issue.

The Office for Students is asking universities to review their practices on how they deal with these allegations and how they fulfil their duties to protect students while they are on campus. As far as I am aware, this is inspected as part of the new Ofsted framework. It came in when Ofsted was not there, if I remember correctly, from September 2020, but Ofsted came back in some form and is now back fully. As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned, the ISI was also involved on the reference group for the review, I believe. We are working closely and there are recommendations on how it is to conduct its own inspections, its training of inspectors and making sure that it talks to young people about these issues—not just bullying and other things but grasping the nettle when it is in schools to talk appropriately to single-sex groups of pupils while it does its inspection.

It is a learning process. We are not starting from nothing. As I say, there has been a lot to do and we have worked very hard on guidance to try to aid schools in this role. The NSPCC helpline is also open until October for young people who have posted on Everyone’s Invited to phone and get the appropriate help and be put through to appropriate agencies, if that is needed. There are also recommendations in terms of the safeguarding partnerships which we put into statute, requiring the police, health and the local authority to work together, and the review asks them to reach out to schools, as they are increasingly part of the process for schools to safeguard their students by referring specific concerns.

This is very much a sense check for us at the moment as to what has been going on. Yes, we have been appalled by the levels, but we are grateful to have had this moment when they were revealed. The review is just one part of a work in progress. We should not underestimate this and I am grateful that the review pointed out the need to professionalise the role of the designated safeguarding lead in our schools. Those people do an amazing job, often dealing with workforce/children issues, with peer-on-peer issues and with children’s social care issues. We should not underestimate what is expected of them in what they are trying to deliver in schools for us. It was clear to me when I met some head teachers the strains that there are on DSLs. They often have to look at these images and then go home to their families: it is a really difficult job. We are looking at the model of the SENCO to see what more we can do to professionalise the DSLs, but I pay tribute to our schools: they really are doing their best to deal with this issue.

Peer-on-peer abuse is very difficult, particularly when a lot of this is not in the criminal justice system. That leaves schools adjudicating, sometimes on issues that may be criminal but do not go down the criminal justice path: how do they protect the victim instead of the criminal justice system? It is a very difficult behaviour and safeguarding issue in our schools and it will be a work in progress to help them fulfil those duties to safeguard our young people.