E
EmilyAlexandra
Guest
I am a school governor, and I have to confess that I didn’t even know that the Secretary of State could ban a school from admitting new students.
On any view, this is sad news. Perhaps it really is time for Ampleforth to close. A lot of schools have encountered these problems, but Ampleforth does appear to have been almost uniquely incompetent in addressing failures. The school is protesting that changes are being made and that they only need a little extra time in which to set their house in order. I’m afraid it sounds like too little, too late. No fewer than 14 paedophiles are known to have operated at Ampleforth over a period of 50 years. Sexual abuse at the school has been reported publicly since 1995 and was documented in a report by Michael Nolan, a retired law lord, in 2001 and a report by a public inquiry in 2018. But now that the school is threatened with closure, they claim that they are finally doing something about it.
To cite one example of which I have slight personal knowledge, Father Bernard Green was convicted of sexually abusing a boy at Ampleforth College. Consequently, he was banned from working with anybody under the age of 19, i.e. he was banned from working with anybody up to and including the age of 18. Therefore, Ampleforth redeployed Father Green to be a tutor at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. The problem with this was that most of the first-year students at St Benet’s Hall would have been 18 years old. The decision to deploy Father Green to Oxford was therefore illegal. Almost needless to say, Father Green’s abuse of young men continued at St Benet’s Hall. It could all have been avoided if they had only complied with the order not to allow him to work with people under age of 19. It’s one thing that the initial abuse took place, quite another to knowingly deploy somebody in a role in which he will be illegally teaching 18-year-olds. Almost unbelievably, Father Green was kept on at St Benet’s until 2012, some seven years after his abuse of undergraduates there first came to light.
Other cases include:
- Father Gregory Carroll: jailed in 2005 for 15 counts of indecent assault and 5 of gross indecency and again in 2020 for 11 counts of indecent assault, 2 of serious sexual assault, and 1 of gross indecency.
- Father Piers Grant-Ferris: jailed in 2006 for 20 counts of indecent assault.
- David Lowe: jailed in 2015 for 15 counts of indecent assault.
- Dara De Cogan: jailed in 2017 for 10 counts of sexual activity with a child aged 16/17 while in a position of trust.
Last edited: