Some reflections on Safeguarding

by Mark Bennet

This is always a good question to ask if you are trying to get an understanding of some complex system. Ofsted visited one of my schools this week, and I told the inspector that we could have all the systems and processes in the world, but governors (and directors) were always attentive to what we were doing for the pupils – schools don’t exist to create systems, but to educate pupils. In the same way the Church of England does not exist to create reports into its mistakes, but to achieve some higher and better purpose – sometimes summarised as the kingdom of God (the language can be debated, the intent is surely clear.

So in the realm of safeguarding and the Clergy Discipline Measure we tend to be dealing with things that have gone wrong, and sometimes very badly wrong. It is natural to wonder why and how, and whether there are things we can do better. And so we have reports – enough reports to fill a decent section of my bookshelf. The thing is a report by itself changes nothing. The lessons learned in producing a “lessons learned” report are learned by the person or team involved in writing the report until that learning is transferred to others. And where the lessons learned involve changes to behaviour or culture, simply reading the report will not make the change happen.

It could be so much better, and serve our core theology better, if we were to begin in a different place. A place which recognises that the doctrine of sin is not a doctrine about others, but about ourselves. So here are some thoughts, inevitably imperfect, about how it might be very different.

The first thing we might notice is that something has gone wrong. So have those responsible acted promptly and with compassion to put it right, so far as that is possible? Have reparations, healing, counselling, restoration been properly considered and robustly enacted? This surely is the very first question – have those who have been hurt been treated properly according to our espoused theology? Any report worth the name should have this as its first question, and should highlight inadequacies as an urgent priority for action.

And yet survivors are kept waiting for years. The advice given by advisers and tolerated (perhaps even welcomed) by those in positions of authority has on occasion been shocking. And we still don’t have a proper redress scheme. Why can’t we measure the effectiveness of our systems by the way that those who have been wronged are treated, and align our actions with our theology.

The second thing to notice is the unsurprising truth that people have done things wrong –from the careless oversight of someone busy under immense pressure to the deliberate commission of evil acts – human failings cover a great range. So the second set of questions is about the people immediately involved (and perhaps the systems in which they are embedded). How serious are the errors? Do they impact fitness to practice? If unaddressed, will others be at risk? What actions need to be taken in relation to those who have erred so that the future will be safer than the past?

So have those who are unfit to practice been removed from any role in which they present a danger? Have those who may be able to continue in post achieved insight into their failings and completed any necessary retraining? Have all the risk factors been identified? Has supervision been put in place to ensure that necessary personal learning has been consolidated and sustained? It is those who have made mistakes who most urgently need to learn from them – how does the Church assure itself that this has happened?

Actually that point about supervision is an important one – it is not present for most roles in the Church, and the assumption that training = effective learning, which would rightly be laughed at in a school, seems to be the operating assumption of the Church of England. We know that Bishops make mistakes – who is alongside them to challenge effectively?

The third thing – and notice it is only third – is that the circumstances of a particular case may not be isolated. Similar mistakes may be made by other people. Similar risks may be taken by people unaware of the potential consequences. This is where the questions about wider learning and wider prevention come in. How can we avoid these errors being replicated by others? And that may require more than transmission of knowledge, though the factual base will always be important context.

So three simple stages to be covered in any report

1. Putting right the wrong
2. Making robust and sustained corrections in the immediate context
3. Securing wider learning

What is difficult about that? Well one problem is that the reports we get seem to take the first two aspects as read and move swiftly to the third. That is a strategic error and we are now acutely aware that the first is rarely addressed adequately. For the second, I have already mentioned the weaknesses in supervision (monitoring could be added) and the challenge of a return to safe practice. For the third, which will be explored further below, effective organisational learning requires some attention to how organisations and people within them actually learn. Simply making recommendations in a report is not enough – as witnessed by the reports over the years which repeatedly say much the same – there is evidence that we have an organisation which is not learning, or is learning reluctantly, and there is a further danger that apparent compliance masks true learning.

But first, the problems of righting the wrong and making corrections in the immediate context. This requires some diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Often it will be easy, but complex situations sometimes arise – Christ Church in Oxford is one example (without going into detail, there are multiple and contested accounts of what has gone wrong and who is responsible). In complex cases a proper diagnosis of what has gone wrong will be a necessary prerequisite for any sensible next step. Often situational power is involved (in parishes, office holders can exercise situational power, and in some contexts orders of ministry are involved too) and in such cases it can be a challenge to secure proper independence, so that the use of situational power (proper or improper, wise or unwise) can be properly considered as part of the review.

Some of the more acute cases we hear about in reviews involve horrific abuse in the context of personal relationships. But in the Church context, it is often difficult to separate what has happened from the wider network of relationships that makes the Church community. Personal loyalties and disbelief of facts can split communities and cause the parties to a complaint to become isolated or ostracised. There is much learning to be done about how to deal with these community impacts and to heal and restore those as part of the repair of damage that has been done. That learning rarely appears in reports, and could be usefully captured and shared so that good practice can be more widely shared and nurtured.

But the reports we do have so often push learning out to those who have not been immediately involved, and there are some psychological aspects about that wider learning which those responsible for reviews (and indeed for leadership) would do well to take seriously.

One thing we should all realise is that most reports are into really bad situations which are rarely encountered. The more routine risks and challenges which face us are rarely the subject of deep analysis (now there’s a worthwhile research project). So when we read a report we can struggle to locate ourselves in it, apart from as a bystander. And that can produce a separation from the learning too – “this isn’t a report about people like me.” In terms of risk, we are looking at events which are (for all the publicity) relatively low frequency, but which have a devastating impact. If we own a doctrine of sin and human fallibility, we need, in humility, to avoid the myth of “never again” yet still to nurture the determination “not on my watch”. “Never again” is a myth about the parts of an organisation I cannot actually influence – it can separate us from the responsibility for action. “Not on my watch” is about the part which is in my remit and locates the responsibility correctly.

A second aspect is that shock has very limited pedagogical value, and again can lead to  personal separation even though it is intended to motivate. I once had to do three basic safeguarding courses in the same month. I was faced three times with the lead stories of horrific abuse which had motivated big changes in safeguarding practice, and faced with the same pictures of children who had died and their abusers. All three organisations were sincere, but I did begin to wonder at what point I would become so de-sensitised that the stories would cease to have an impact and the whole thing would become counter-productive. The routine repetition of basic material over time can easily become just that – a routine chore, rather than an occasion of learning. The pedagogical aspects of training over time need to be considered with some care, so that those completing courses are actually engaged in useful learning. And the immediate self-evaluation of a course is of limited value in understanding whether learning is established and sustained.

A third aspect is how learning sits within the organisation as a whole. If we cannot see visible learning in our leaders, we may become cynical about our own learning and revert to passive forms of compliance. In a former life as a Chartered Accountant I was involved in fraud investigations. It was well known amongst colleagues that over-regulation could be organisationally disastrous, and in fact provide occasions for fraud. What happens is that something goes wrong; the organisation doubles down on regulations designed to prevent repetition; the regulations are so burdensome that some people start to sit light to them as far as they can get away with; without the burden of regulation some of those entrepreneurial spirits achieve successes which elude those who follow the rules; the successful people are recognised and promoted; over time people learn that you can succeed only by getting round the regulations, the leaders no longer own the regulatory structure and the the risks return and are exploited once again.

It is a key aspect of leadership to direct and own the culture of compliance and risk. The attractiveness of over-regulation is that those who breach the rules can be held responsible for failures, and so the leaders will never be held accountable. (Something like this has happened in hospitals, until recently – chronic understaffing of maternity units has been elided from reviews, because what goes wrong can always be attributed in some way to frontline staff – the fact that their working conditions affect attentiveness and that staff are working well beyond safe capacity becomes a side issue. It has taken a very long time for the point to get into public discourse – one feature is the utter professionalism and care of most staff which might resist rather telling bad stories about their work).

If leaders are not seen to be taking their share of the risk, or if they are seen to be sitting light to the rules, the context for learning from a course is hugely impoverished. What people learn from observing the organisation and its leaders trumps the course almost every time.

Finally, securing wider learning is more than rolling out a course. As the Ofsted inspector remarked– I want to see teachers checking that their pupils are learning what they are being taught, and when I interview pupils I test whether they have retained what they have been taught. What are we doing in the Church of England to close the learning cycle and make sure that what is being taught is being learned and is transforming practice?

I could write much more on the subject, but I suspect that this would dilute a rather simple message, that if we are looking at reports to serve the Church well, there are, at root, three clear objectives:

1. Putting right the wrong
2. Making robust and sustained corrections in the immediate context
3. Securing wider learning

It may be that by the time the report gets written, which is usually well after the presenting events, the first and second have been attended to. But the report should say clearly whether this is the case or not. And in securing wider learning, the report will be the beginning of that process rather than the end of it.