Parents are suing a special school after a BBC investigation uncovered CCTV footage showing autistic children being locked inside calming rooms and abused.<\/p>\n
Ten families are claiming that their children \u2013 all of whom had learning disabilities or several mental disorders – were amongst those harmed by their treatment in the rooms.<\/p>\n
A police investigation into the abuse, recorded inside the rooms at Whitefield special school in north London, ended two years ago without any charges.<\/p>\n
The school is now run by a new trust which says the failings have led to “important learning”.<\/p>\n
Many special schools use seclusion spaces such as calming rooms outside of classrooms to address sensory needs or challenging behaviour.<\/p>\n
But the leaked footage obtained by the BBC showed children being shoved into padded rooms, thrown to the floor, restrained by the neck – or left alone, sitting in vomit.<\/p>\n
One 12-year-old boy appeared in over 55 hours of CCTV footage filmed inside the rooms.<\/p>\n
At the time, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, said the use of the rooms was “horrifying”.<\/p>\n
Leigh Day is now bringing a civil legal claim on behalf of 10 families against the trust which ran the school and the London borough of Waltham Forest.<\/p>\n
The law firm says the use of the rooms was “barbaric”, according to its clients. The claim alleges that children were falsely imprisoned and their human rights were breached.<\/p>\n
“What was done to these children was profoundly harmful, and its impact continues to be felt by families every day”, says Alison Millar, who is leading the case.<\/p>\n
The CCTV obtained by the BBC had been recorded between 2014 and 2017 but only emerged in 2021.<\/p>\n
Last month, a long-delayed review commissioned by Waltham Forest found that restraint and seclusion became “normalised” and a culture developed that allowed “pejorative views of non-compliant children”.<\/p>\n
It added that parents were clear that the practices were “unimaginable” and “inhumane”.<\/p>\n
The BBC has also found evidence of mistreatment in seclusion rooms at other schools across the UK.<\/p>\n
CCTV from a different school showed a boy being “brutally” and “unlawfully” restrained, while elsewhere an autistic child was kept inside a cage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parents are suing a special school after a BBC investigation uncovered CCTV footage showing autistic children being locked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-721368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}