CCTV shows pupils abused and locked in padded room

CCTV from a school obtained by the BBC shows autistic children being shoved into padded rooms, thrown to the floor, restrained by the neck – or left alone, sitting in vomit.

The footage from Whitefield School in north-east London resembles “torture”, one safeguarding expert told us. It shows for the first time the reality of what pupils faced.

A police investigation into the abuse footage, taken inside the special school’s “calming rooms” between 2014 and 2017, ended earlier this year without any charges. However, parents say they have been left to deal with the trauma.

The school says new leadership found the footage after the rooms had been shut and shared it with the police.

About 40 children with learning disabilities and severe mental disorders were confined for hours in the rooms – typically without food or drink.

Six of the families have agreed for the BBC to show the footage. 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 by the BBC, 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”.

The BBC has 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 BBC learned 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, we exposed how 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.

Since we began investigating, we have obtained leaked school and council documents, and spoken to 17 of the 39 affected families.

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 he 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 BBC 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 to the BBC shows the boy punching himself in the nose while alone inside the room.

The BBC has spent months 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.

The BBC has 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.

She told the investigation that contacting the school’s leadership was “hard to do as a teaching assistant” and had become “desensitised” to the footage, according to records of her interview obtained by the BBC.

A different teaching assistant told the safeguarding investigator that she had seen footage of a colleague observing a child masturbating for over an hour. Police reported that they were unable to corroborate what she said.

The BBC has also uncovered other failings affecting children with special educational needs placed in seclusion across the UK, with an autistic child being kept in a cage at one school about 10 years ago.

The area below a stairwell was enclosed by a cage and another cage with a mattress inside at a school called Include in Bury St Edmunds, which offers alternative provision for children outside mainstream education and is run by the charity Catch22.

The mother of the autistic child only discovered these cages were in use when she visited the school without an appointment, having grown concerned about the real nature of what was referred to as “The Den”.

She said the stairwell cage would be covered by a blanket when the child was shouting and that her son was sometimes kept inside one of these cages for up to six hours, without water or access to a toilet.

“Even an animal wouldn’t have been left in a cage for that long”, she says.

Council records state that Ofsted were informed about what the mother found but there was no inspection. Ofsted now says it cannot find any record of a complaint.

Catch22 says the spaces were used by previous leadership and a 2018 council report concluded that there was no proof pupils were locked inside.

Regulation of the use and design of calming rooms is now urgently needed – according to Sir Iain Duncan-Smith.

Following our investigation in April, the Children’s Commissioner also called for changes to guidance on the use of seclusion in special schools – which has not happened. The Department for Education says it is “looking” at ways to “strengthen” it.

The Metropolitan Police says it continues to conduct “wider enquiries” about Whitefield, not relating to abuse. The Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment.

The Flourish Trust, which runs Whitefield, says it has learned from the failings in this case.

Ofsted says responsibility for investigating the harm caused to children following its discovery of the rooms lay with the Department for Education, as regulator, and Waltham Forest.

Although it failed to investigate after Ofsted’s inspection, Waltham Forest says it will now commission a local case review, which it says will be “wholly independent”. It says it had not asked to review CCTV at any point because it did not know it existed.

Waltham Forest also says it has offered counselling to families. But the families told the BBC their children need significant and wide-ranging help to address the abuse they faced – and they will be living with its consequences for the rest of their lives.

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