SEN

KIDS: A SUITABLE TARGET FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES?

How journalists delivered a knockout blow to one special educational needs
school

Congratulations to The Sunday Times for their 10,000th edition. In a difficult
journalistic landscape The Sunday Times is still going strong.
But in 2013 The Sunday Times used its influence to take down a small
boarding school educating 189 children with special educational needs.
The catalyst was a special educational needs disability discrimination Tribunal
which found that the school, Stanbridge Earls in Romsey, Hampshire, had
discriminated against a girl pupil.
Around this case, The Sunday Times built a story of multiple girls having been
abused at the school by male pupils. On 24th March 2013 the headline was
School Boarders in Sex Attacks on Girls, on 31st March it was Lord of the Flies
school ignored sex claims. The myth of child-on-child abuse at Stanbridge Earls
was well and truly launched in to the public domain, and continued across a
series of articles in the Sunday Times.
The problem with The Sunday Times story was that accounts of abuse against
girls at Stanbridge were generated by a small group of people with a grudge
against the school. After several thousand hours of police investigation, five
reviews of the evidence by the CPS, and two independent reviews (one of them a
Serious Case Review), no evidence at all of abuse could be established.
The paper promoted the case that girls were not safe at the school so it should
close. The school was unable to defend itself against the barrage of bad publicity,
and as a result did close in August 2013, leaving the children with no school to go
to when the new school year started in September. Some children dropped out of
education altogether at that point. Some went to unsuitable schools that could
not meet their needs. Most suffered in some way, and all mourned the loss of a
school many had come to regard as a second home.
Moreover, the claims made by The Sunday Times, related to children no longer
at the school, but it was the children still there who bore the brunt of the papers
muckraking. They had to watch as some of their peers were falsely accused and
their teachers attacked in the press. They were powerless to speak up for their
school. They were voiceless.

Despite the findings of the various investigations, The Sunday Times is

completely unrepentant, and refuses to remove its articles from its website, or
apologise to the children.
As the editor pointed out gleefully to me, The Sunday Times is not accountable
to parents or children of the school. As for the school itself well, its dead so it
cant sue.
But past pupils and parents are tenacious and the Stanbridge spirit lives on to
fight for the name of the school to be cleared.

Jane Aitken