• an “In My View” article by NIGEL WARD, reviewing the tenure of NYCC’s departing Head of CYPS, Pete DWYER.

~~~~~

Following yesterday’s exclusive report in the North Yorks Enquirer to the effect that NYCC’s much-beleaguered Corporate Director: Children & Young Peoples’ Services (CYPS) Pete DWYER has chosen to ‘retire’ from his position (giving six months notice to allow for the recruitment of a replacement) after less than four years in the position, the talk in the staff rooms of almost every school in the County has centred on one key question:

• “Did he jump – or was he pushed?”

In fact, Pete DWYER (b. February 1958) had already attained potential retirement age (55) at the time of his 2013 appointment at NYCC.

At a time when virtually every school in North Yorkshire is evaluating and actively soliciting Academy partners, reputational management – an area in which Pete DWYER excelled during his time at City of York Council – has percolated to the very top of the agenda.

It is in this area the Pete DWYER has most had his work cut out – and where he has not, in my view, proved equal to the task.

In fairness, he inherited a mess when he stepped up from being the head honcho for schools at City of York Council, where his reputation was excellent, both as an administrator and on a purely human level: smart, committed and personable in the extreme – an all-round good guy.

He must have appeared the perfect candidate to replace his predecessor at NYCC, Cynthia WELBOURNE, whose hapless design for the roll-out of the Extended Schools “Me Too!” School Voucher Scheme, which allowed much of a £1.5M grant from central government (10%-matched by another £150K from County) to be siphoned off by an army of opportunist service-providers (including SBC), is widely believed to have cost her her position.

Some of these service providers were given the inside nod about how best to exploit a system that was later described as “a licence to print money”.

Like every other local authority cock-up, the “Me Too!” fiasco was swiftly and safely covered up and forgotten – though not, perhaps,  by County Councillor Joe PLANT [Con.], whose election majority is far from secure.

But unfortunately for Mr DWYER, his arrival at County Hall coincided with the very moment when child sexual abuse (CSA) was on the front pages of the newspapers. Jimmy SAVILE and Peter JACONELLI were certainly the most high-profile abusers in the North Yorkshire area but, before long, virtually everyone in a position of trust with children and young people came under the most intense scrutiny.

This scrutiny concentrated not only on the abusers themselves, but on the management systems that had allowed predatory paedophiles to infiltrate our schools, care homes and hospitals.

On this count alone, Pete DWYER’s lot may not have been an enviable one. But the Conservative government’s drive towards the direct funding of Academies certainly has added greatly to his burden. It must be remembered that not only does NYCC, in its Local Education Authority incarnation, provide the funding to state schools, it also recoups money from them, too, in the form of fees for services – such as building and grounds maintenance, HR facilities, legal services and so on.

Readers will no doubt retain clear memories of Pete DWYER’s drive to close Eskdale School in Whitby, with a view to recouping for County something in the order of £15M from the sale of the site for housing development.

But battles like the Eskdale School stand-off are meat-and-potatoes to Pete DWYER and his colleagues; of far more concern are the many Safeguarding issues that have arisen in the wake of the CSA scandals. Many parents have looked more closely at the stories their children have brought home from school, and many have tried (frequently in vain) to enlist the help of CYPS in their Safeguarding concerns. (Again, regular readers will know that my own efforts to address Safeguarding issues have been stone-walled at every turn).

What is not so commonly known is the extent to which CSA is prevalent in schools today. The sad truth is that both CYPS and Human Resources (HR) have performed disastrously when it comes to all aspects of Safeguarding. Nevertheless, a diligent application of ‘reputational management’ has mostly kept the lid on a catalogue of horrendous failures. This ‘reputational management’ frequently relies on the tried-and-tested technique of dragging out investigations, sometimes over a period of years, and moving suspects sideways to other parts of the country – so that if the ordure eventually does hit the fan, it does so only in far-flung out-of-area local/regional newspapers, seldom here in North Yorkshire.

Let me offer some examples:

Music teacher Simon BALL, formerly of Giggleswick Senior School in Settle, North Yorkshire, was ‘outed’ and prosecuted (in November 2016) only after moving to a school near Huntingdon – conveniently minimising the ‘reputational damage’ to NYCC.

Yet his conduct was widely known in the school and the local community. How could NYCC have missed it? Obviously, they did not.

And there are more such incidents:

• “Misconduct claims rock city college”

“A spokesman from the local education authority, North Yorkshire County Council, has refused to comment on the nature of the allegation leading to the suspension.”

• “Whitby college teacher suspended”

“North Yorkshire County Council can confirm that a teacher has been suspended from Whitby Community College and that an investigation is currently under way.”

Of course, these particular examples precede Pete DWYER’s period of tenure. But let us remember that he was hired to clean up the detritus left by his predecessor. He is now walking away from some detritus of his own.

• “Parents speak of anger after finding children’s picture on paedophile’s Twitter account”

County Councillor Stuart Parsons told the NE: “If a multi-agency team were working on having the picture removed or the account suspended, parents should have been told so they didn’t have to find out through other parents.

“The team has been investigating it but it seems odd the parents weren’t told.”

Parents of children past and present at Hawsker C of E Primary School may not find it odd at all, being by now veterans of NYCC’s “mushroom” policy – “keep ’em in the dark and feed ’em sh*t!”

Sadly, the truth is that it is a commonplace for NYCC to learn nothing about Safeguarding incidents because senior management figures in schools routinely avoid logging anything that they hope they can be swiftly punted into the long grass. In many cases, they do not even inform their own Governing Bodies!

And in some cases, senior management appears to have to have actually colluded in the protection of abusers. I refer, by way of example, to my own article of 5th September 2016, covering decades-long abuses at Ampleforth College, entitled “Savile/Jaconelli – Far From The MADDEN* Crowd?”, first revealed by Andrew NORFOLK of The Times newspaper.

I am not suggesting that Peter DWYER bears the burden for this lamentable state of affairs – only that he has signally failed to rectify it.

Equally disturbing are the cases in which NYCC’s over-zealous determination to be seen to be doing well have resulted in long drawn-out ordeals for innocent teaching staff:

• “Blast by judge as teacher cleared over sex charges
  

“Prosecutor Simon Kealey said it had been a ‘substantial and complex’ investigation by North Yorkshire Police. He said there had been problems with officers in the child abuse investigation team, at Northallerton [NYCC], either being on long-term sick or on ‘restricted’ duties”

and, from an NYCC spokesperson

“A full review of the investigation will be undertaken to assess any lessons learned and until this review is completed it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

One would doubt that the falsely accused teacher in that case, Neil FRANCIS, draws much consolation from that pitiful old disclaimer about “lessons learned”.

One of those “lessons learned” during the DWYER years has been to keep CYPS/HR failures out of the newspapers. Indeed, a number of catastrophic errors of judgement have been kept out of the press completely, including a recent case in my own area (very similar to the last of those cited above), that I have refrained from reporting for very obvious reasons.

I am also being kept abreast of a diabolical cover-up by a Headteacher (with no small help from the LEA) of a case involving rape and self-harming in a well-renowned school in the north-western part of the County. Indeed, it was this case that led me to ask Pete DWYER whether or not the Hawsker Primary School suspension had been reported to the National College of Teaching & Leadership (NCTL), OfSTED and the North Yorkshire Police. The recent OfSTED inspection will, I am sure, trigger huge upheavals – behind closed doors, we may be sure.

What is very clear is that when all of the material that I hold on file is reviewed by out-of-area inspectors, NYCC will have no option but to revise and refine its patently inadequate management of Safeguarding issues.

In summary, and apropos the “did he jump or was he pushed” conundrum, let us remember that Pete DWYER has taken circa half a million pounds in salary out of the North Yorkshire coffers in the last (nearly) four years and, given an average life expectancy, may well take out another half million pounds through his pension plan. And for what?

In my relatively well-informed opinion, for a million pounds worth of failure.

That is what we get in the way of “value for money” NYCC-style? Can they really do no better?

• an “In My View” article by NIGEL WARD, pondering the apparent blind spot of the North Yorkshire Police – historical Child Sexual Abuse (CSA).

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Scarborough

Regular and long-term readers of the North Yorks Enquirer will be aware of the prominent part played by myself and co-contributor Tim HICKS in the exposure of the predatory paedophile and former Scarborough Mayor, Councillor and Alderman, Peter JACONELLI [Con.] and his close association and serial co-offending with Jimmy SAVILE.

Simply by typing those names (individually or together) into the search box at the top right of this page, the whole story can be accessed in reverse chronological order. Our investigations culminated in a grudging acknowledgement by the North Yorkshire Police that our allegations were true. I suspect that we are not forgiven.

Following my FOIA request to the CPS, it finally emerged that lifelong predatory paedophile Peter JACONELLI had been charged in his Mayoral year (1972), but the Director of Public Prosecutions, distinguished Freemason Sir Norman SKELHORN K.B.E., Q.C., chose not to proceed. A review of the following article will serve to place the thrust of this present piece in a historical context:

• PETER JACONELLI And The Paedo-Friendly DPP

Ampleforth

Turning now to recent reports emanating from Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire regarding a series of allegations of sexual abuse at the prestigious school over a period of several decades, most readers will be aware that, beginning on 24th August 2016, Andrew NORFOLK, Chief Investigative Reporter at The Times newspaper (and formerly, long ago, a junior reporter at the Scarborough Evening News), published a series of articles breaking a new twist in the Ampleforth story:

• “Top school hid sex abuse claims”
• “Suicide shattered Ampleforth’s silence over sex abuse claims”
• “New claims emerge of abuse at Ampleforth”

Readers may recall that it was Andrew NORFOLK who broke the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal.

In broad strokes, Andrew NORFOLK is reporting that the sexual abuse of pupils at the College has been a long-concealed but very persistent problem, and that the North Yorkshire Police (NYP) has not covered itself in glory in the pursuit of its investigations. Ding, ding – a familiar ring.

The following report, 27th April 1996, appears to have escaped the attention of the mainstream press:

Back in 2005, when the present (until earlier this week) Abbot of Ampleforth Father Cuthbert MADDEN* (the eponymous MADDEN [* see title] – NOT the similarly-named Thomas HARDY novel) was elected to his first eight year term of office, the College endured a wave of damaging publicity. This Independent article tells the tale:

• “Abuse: ‘To have a monk strip your lower half and beat you was what you expected'”

Bringing things up to date, the Daily Mail published the following article on 1st September 2016:

• “Abbot of Ampleforth who is most senior figure at Britain’s leading Catholic public school is being investigated for ‘sex offences against boys'”

This was followed, the very next day, by this:

• “Did one of our top public schools turn a blind eye to stories of abuse for years?”

All this follows hard on the heels of the resignation, in June 2016, of the College’s first lay headmaster David LAMBON after a tenure of just less than two years. Most unusually, Mr David LAMBON (pictured below), whose reputation is that of a reformer, offered no explanation for his unexpected departure. It is not suggested that Mr LAMBON was in any way associated with CSA at the College.

The Link

On the face of it, any similarity with the SAVILE/JACONELLI saga would appear to extend no further than the questionable degree of diligence exercised by the NYP in its various CSA investigations.

Nevertheless, readers should be forgiven for wondering what other connections between the SAVILE/JACONELLI child abuse offences and those at Ampleforth College are about to emerge, beyond the fact that both SAVILE and JACONELLI were devout Roman Catholics – and Freemasons.

The Abbot

George Haliburton HUME (pictured above) attended Ampleforth College from 1936 to 1941. Thereafter, at the age of eighteen, he entered the novitiate of the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth Abbey. He studied modern history (St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford), then theology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, before being ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1945, when he adopted the monastic name Basil.

Basil HUME returned to Ampleforth College to teach religious education, history, French and German. He served as Head of the school’s Department of Modern Languages before becoming the Abbot of Ampleforth Abbey in 1963, in which position he remained until, in 1976,  he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster by Pope Paul VI.

1963-1976 was the peak period of the SAVILE/JACONELLI partnership.

The following extract from Basil HUME’s Wikipedia entry fills in some background:

Controversies

Hume was accused of ‘hushing up’ a suspected sexual abuse scandal at Ampleforth College by not calling in the police when he received a complaint from parents in 1975 about Father Piers Grant-Ferris, the son of a Tory peer at Gilling Castle, formerly a prep school for Ampleforth. In 2005, Grant-Ferris admitted 20 incidents of child abuse. This was not an isolated incident and involved other monks and lay members. The Yorkshire Post reported in 2005; “Pupils at a leading Roman Catholic school suffered decades of abuse from at least six paedophiles following a decision by former Abbot Basil Hume not to call in police at the beginning of the scandal.”^[16]

In 1984, Cardinal Hume nominated Jimmy Savile as a member of the Athenaeum, a gentlemen’s club in London’s Pall Mall. Following the posthumous revelation of Savile’s repeated sexual abuse of minors, members of the club have criticised Hume’s nomination of him for causing embarrassment to the club.^[17]

HUME’s nomination of SAVILE to membership of the Athenaeum was seconded by another close confrère of SAVILE, Cardinal Keith O’BRIEN (featured image), who, in March 2015, was stripped of his privileges by the Pope following his exposure as a sexual offender.

Here is what award-winning SAVILE biographer Dan DAVIES (whose ‘In Plain Sight – the Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile’ dedicates a chapter [67] to the investigations carried out by me and Tim HICKS) has to say about SAVILE, HUME and the Athenaeum:

This extract from an 2014 Daily Express report on the Athenaeum is also informative:

“It has also emerged that the members of the Athenaeum were horrified when Jimmy Savile was elected, on the grounds that the tracksuit wearing DJ ‘would not be a natural habitué of a club that has counted Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Palmerston and Lord Curzon as members’. The only reason they didn’t veto him was because he was nominated by Cardinal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Hume would have had to step down if his nominee was blackballed.”

To suggest that Basil HUME went ‘out on a limb’ for Jimmy SAVILE would be a monumental understatement.

Clearly, they must have been very, very close indeed – (What??? A Benedictine monk and a trashy DJ? A modern languages scholar and an all-in wrestler/marthon runner? A monastic headmaster (with a grave duty of care) and a prime-time cornball TV-presenter?

But we do know that they had at least one ‘interest’ in common – and they had it in common with SAVILE’s closest co-offender, Peter JACONELLI.

Like SAVILE and JACONELLI, HUME was a Freemason, of high degree, and with infinite loyalty to fellow brothers.

Basil HUME died on 17th June 1999, two weeks after receiving the Order of Merit. For a fuller picture of Basil HUME, see the Independent obituary, here.

In the light of the on-going Ampleforth revelations, Basil HUME’s relationship with Jimmy SAVILE merits the closest scrutiny.

And what about any relationship between Basil HUME and Peter JACONELLI?

Are we to believe that that Abbott Basil HUME, Athenaeum patron of one of the two most prolific predatory paedophiles of our times – both of them Catholic, both of them Freemasons, both of them perverts who offended together as well as separately – knew nothing of SAVILE’s co-offender and alleged sexual partner, Peter JACONELLI, the Roman Catholic Freemason? Tell that one to the Marines.

So I would be greatly obliged to anyone who can corroborate a (presently) solitary report that, as Abbot of Ampleforth, it was Basil HUME who received the Sacrament of Penance (confession) from Peter JACONELLI, a frequent caller at the Abbey in the triangle between Scarborough, County Hall (Northallerton) and the ‘meat racks’ of Leeds. The public has a right to know precisely how wide the web of North Yorkshire paedophilia really was, operating freely under the noses of the North Yorkshire Police.

Please contact me, in strictest confidence, by email at: mailto:news@nyenquirer.uk entering the words ‘FAO NIGEL – RE: AMPLEFORTH’, all upper case, in the Subject Line. Thank you.

More about the Sacrament of Penance (Confession)