Beth and Peter Morrison were thrilled when their son got into a school that catered for his disabilities. Then they learned he was being restrained, bound and injured
Sat 6 Jul 2019 08.00 BST
Beth and Peter Morrison remember every detail about the day their son Calum returned, broken, from Kingspark school. It was Friday 24 September 2010. The school bus dropped him home at 3.25pm. His face was ashen, his lips blue. He was wearing different clothes from those he had left in that morning – a thin T-shirt, shorts and plimsolls, no underwear and no coat. His own clothes were soaked in urine and stuffed in a plastic bag. “I asked him what was wrong. He said: ‘I dizzy, Mummy, teacher hurt,’” Beth says. Although Calum was 11 at the time, he still spoke like a toddler.
Beth called the school immediately to find out what had happened. Beth says she was kept holding for more than 15 minutes before being told staff were in a meeting. That evening, Calum was clingy and tearful. “As I was tucking him in for the night, he said: ‘No school, Mummy, school bad.’”
The next morning, when Beth was taking off his pyjamas, she noticed the bruises on his upper arms. She asked Calum about them. “Teacher hurt arm. Wet on the floor,” he said. She looked in the home-school diary – a logbook used by the school and Calum’s parents to relay noteworthy incidents – for clues as to what had happened. Nothing was recorded.
We are sitting in the kitchen of the Morrisons’ bungalow in a small coastal town near Dundee. Their home, which has been adapted to Calum’s needs, has a warm, welcoming feel. Calum, now 20, wanders in and out. He is lovable, chatty and childlike. His language still resembles that of a four-year-old.
In Calum’s early years, his parents thought he was simply a gifted child. He taught himself to read at three and on his first day at primary school he wrote the word “conscientiousness” on the teacher’s desk. At seven, he had a reading age of 14. Yet he was still non-verbal. He was sent to a specialist, who diagnosed hyperlexia – a syndrome characterised by a child’s precocious ability to read, accompanied by profound difficulties in understanding and talking. He was also diagnosed with epilepsy, cerebral palsy and autism.
It had all started so promisingly at Kingspark, a special educational needs school in Dundee. The school, which caters for children with complex medical problems and learning difficulties, had just opened. The facilities were impressive – two swimming pools, specially adapted bikes, a soft-play area, sensory rooms. Most importantly, it had a fully equipped medical centre on site. The medical team could reach anywhere in the building within a minute of a panic button being pressed. Beth and Peter were relieved. Their son would be happy here.
And he was. For six weeks. Then they were told that Calum was being placed in the school’s enhanced support area (ESA). “I thought it was a promotion, and we were pleased Calum was doing so well,” says Beth. It was on his first day there that he returned home badly bruised. “He did have regular seizures, so we thought perhaps he had injured himself and staff had held his arms tightly to prevent further harm,” Peter says. Although Beth was not able to speak to a teacher when she called that afternoon, the Morrisons were convinced there must have been a simple explanation, so they sent Calum back to school the following Monday.
From 9am, Beth phoned the school repeatedly to find out what had happened, but she says nobody would talk to her. In the afternoon, she says, a member of staff rang back. Beth asked if the bruises and urine-soaked clothes were the result of a seizure. She says she was told they were the result of Calum having had an outburst. “She said he had been restrained for ‘behaviour’ and then ‘urinated out of protest’. She said they had sat him in a chair with an egg timer in front of him, so he could see he was being punished. We later found out from staff statements that Calum had been strapped into a chair.”
If his injuries had occurred at home, Calum would have been removed from us. But we were told he had to return there
Nine years on, Calum’s parents are still shocked. “Urinating in protest?” Peter says. “Our son had not wet himself once since he was out of nappies. And he doesn’t have outbursts at home. Of course he gets upset sometimes, but we can always talk him round.” Not only had Calum never seen an egg timer, but he had no concept of time – and still has none today. Beth put all this to the school, and she says she can recite the reply verbatim: “Don’t worry, Mrs Morrison, we can handle this. It’s going to be hard, but we can manage this. Calum must learn to behave.”
The Morrisons’ first thought was to take Calum out of Kingspark immediately. But they were told by the council that it was the only school equipped to deal with Calum’s needs and that a criminal prosecution against the parents could follow any refusal to school him. So they agreed to let him continue there while they sought advice.
A day later, on Tuesday 28 September, Calum again returned from school distressed and wearing different clothes, his own soaked in urine and in a bag. He had a long abrasion down his spine and hundreds of tiny, red spots across his body. His parents feared it was meningitis and took him to the local doctors’ surgery. The GP suggested that Calum was suffering petechial haemorrhaging, most likely caused by extreme pressure on his chest while being restrained face down on the floor. She arranged for him to go to hospital for tests the next day, to rule out a blood-clotting problem. By Wednesday morning, all of Calum’s bruises were clearly visible – Beth counted 63 of them, including 16 on his upper right arm alone. His spine and throat were bruised and there were hand-print marks on his right shoulder and each of his ankles. The doctor who conducted the tests on Calum that day suggested the police should be informed about his injuries.
Calum did not return to Kingspark that week. Beth asked what had happened on the Tuesday and says she was told that he had been restrained in the gym by four staff members, for “refusing to follow the same route as the other children” when riding a bike designed for children with disabilities. It later emerged from records of the incident that two members of staff were across his legs, one was over the top of his body while another held his chin off the floor. After being pinned down, he had wet himself. He was then stripped of his clothes and again put in the chair with the egg timer. Although Calum was 11, he weighed four stone (25kg) and was the size of an average seven-year-old.
“If Calum’s injuries had occurred at home, our boy would have been removed from us,” Peter says. “But we were told that he had to return to the place that had hurt him. And we were repeatedly warned by Dundee council that it was a criminal offence to refuse to send him to school.”
What is defined as “reasonable force” can be used in British schools to prevent a pupil from committing an offence, causing injury or damage or disrupting good order. Beth says that restraining children such as Calum for breaking rules is nonsense, because they have no concept of what the rules are. Then there is the slippery word “reasonable”. Beth believes the force used against Calum was anything but.
The Morrisons said they would send him back to school only with a guarantee that he would not be restrained. Three weeks after his first restraint, Calum returned. There were no more bruises or soiled clothing, but he was terrified of the school. Eventually, it was agreed he would attend only for half days, which he did for the next two and a half years.
Beth says the final straw came on Wednesday 15 May 2013. Calum was attending Kingspark only in the afternoons, driven there by Beth or Peter. That day, Beth and Calum arrived at 1.20pm. They waited in reception until a teacher arrived to take him. “I saw a small boy, about eight or nine years old, being led along a corridor, with two members of staff holding his upper arms tightly,” Beth says. “The boy started flapping his hands, like lots of autistic children do. He didn’t seem to be in danger of hurting himself or the others, but then staff appeared to slam his body into the wall and restrain him with a force that horrified me.”
Beth reported what she had seen to the police, who investigated and brought no charges. Calum never returned to Kingspark. His parents sent him to Carnoustie high, a mainstream school, where he spent four happy years. “Peter and I watched proudly as he went to his senior school prom and had a fantastic time,” Beth says. “The staff loved him and he was very well cared for.”
From the day Calum left Kingspark, Beth swore she would campaign to abolish the use of restraint for disciplinary purposes against special-needs children, and to ensure it is used as a last resort only to prevent harm to the child or others. She is also fighting to ensure that parents are informed when children are restrained. Six years on, she is still campaigning.
Soon after Calum left, other parents got in touch to tell her their children’s stories. Peter says they hadn’t realised the practice was widespread, as there was no “school-gate culture” at Kingspark; the children were picked up in the morning by a school bus and dropped at home in the afternoon. “This is how schools like Kingspark get away with it,” he says.
In 2017, Beth set up the charity Positive & Active Behaviour Support Scotland (PABSS), which has collated 712 stories from families of children with additional needs who have been injured while being restrained. She says that “not a single one of these children is neurotypical”. Earlier this year, PABSS and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation, a UK-wide charity for people with severe learning disabilities, produced a report showing that, of the 566 families of children with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour surveyed, 88% said their child had experienced restraint, with 35% saying they had experienced it regularly. Most of these restraints occurred in school settings. Fifty-eight per cent of families questioned said their children had suffered injuries after being restrained, including “unexplained bruises, what looked like carpet burns to knees and ankles, unexplained broken wrist”.
The report examined all restrictive interventions with disabled children, including mechanical restraint (such as being strapped into a chair), chemical restraint (medication) and seclusion (being isolated in a room that the child is prevented from leaving), concluding that all were overused. Sixty per cent of those surveyed believed that restrictive interventions were used by schools as their main method of tackling challenging behaviour, rather than as a last resort to prevent injury. Only 17% of the families surveyed said that a restrictive intervention had been recorded.
In 2016, Beth won an award for outstanding achievement at the British Institute of Learning Disabilities. Last year, she was inducted on to the Saltire Society’s list of outstanding women of Scotland. But it is little consolation for the guilt she feels over her son’s experience, she says. “Calum tried desperately to communicate how distressed he was and I missed the signs. I will have to live with the fact for the rest of my life.”
In 2015, Dr Brodie Paterson, a specialist in handling vulnerable people, published a report claiming that Calum’s injuries were “inconsistent” with the correct restraint techniques, and that he had “previously only come across such petechial haemorrhaging in fatalities associated with restraint application”. He claims that Calum was exposed to a potentially fatal level of risk that was “grossly disproportionate”. A police investigation concluded in March 2014 that there had been “no criminal intent” on the part of the staff who restrained Calum.
Kingspark declined to comment on specific cases. A spokesperson for Dundee city council said: “The council has engaged with the Scottish children and young people’s commissioner’s investigation and subsequent report and has many of the recommendations in place. The most recent inspection of Kingspark school and local authority quality-assurance processes have found the school to provide a strong focus on ensuring the wellbeing of children and young people. These specific allegations were made nine years ago and it would not be appropriate to comment on individual issues.”
It was a fellow pupil who drew attention, in 2017, to the treatment of Michelle. The pupil – who, like Michelle, had special needs – scrawled a note that was passed on to Michelle’s parents. “Michelle has been locked in a room and has been banging on the door very loud all afternoon,” it said.
Michelle’s parents, Jane and Andrew, knew she had behaviour issues, but they had no idea that their 15-year-old daughter was regularly locked in a tiny, bare room. (The school has since admitted doing so.) “We were disgusted when we found out – sick and angry and sad,” Jane says. Like Beth, she talks of an overwhelming sense of guilt.
We meet Jane on a windy day at a hotel in Edinburgh, not far from where the family live in a small town in the Scottish Borders. Michelle cannot be here because she is in hospital having her seizure activity monitored. She has a rare, severe form of epilepsy.
Jane had a traumatic pregnancy. When she was 24 weeks pregnant, her brother died suddenly. She later discovered that, in the same week, Michelle suffered a stroke in the womb. Michelle was partly paralysed down the right side of her body. She was later diagnosed with autism and has traits of pathological demand avoidance (PDA), meaning that she resists everyday demands and expectations because they cause her huge anxiety.
Shortly before her fourth birthday, Michelle started at a local nursery, three mornings a week. When she was asked to do something she didn’t want to do, or couldn’t do, she would lie on the floor shouting. At the age of six, she started primary school and began to exhibit aggressive behaviour – swearing, spitting and lashing out at staff. She progressed to a mainstream secondary school, which had an annexe for children with special needs. Jane was told that occasionally Michelle would be given “time out” in a “blue space”, but it seemed nothing to worry about. If anything, it sounded rather idyllic.
Then Jane discovered that the space was a small, locked room with bolts on the outside, and that Michelle would hammer on the door to be released. Her parents withdrew Michelle from the school and began to investigate her educational history through freedom of information (FoI) requests. The more they found out, the more horrified they became. Her parents had never been told that she had been restrained at primary school and barred from school trips. One of a series of documents obtained under FoI revealed that Michelle’s teaching assistant had previous been sacked from a care home for abusing residents.
Jane discovered from the documents that, at secondary school, Michelle had been secluded on a daily basis as punishment for non-compliance. As Jane points out, Michelle doesn’t know how to comply. Perhaps most shockingly, Michelle’s behaviour support plan, which her parents had never been shown, stated that if members of staff were spat at by Michelle, they should “use a tissue to wipe the spit off yourself and gently wipe it back on to Michelle”. “The instruction was written by a teacher without talking to us or Michelle’s doctor or any of the experts,” Jane says. “The behaviour support plan was purely punitive. It was threatening all the way through, written without any understanding of Michelle’s individual needs.”
The school’s internal memo of the afternoon that triggered the alarm, which was obtained through a subject access request by Michelle’s parents, states that Michelle was “guided to the safe room following a small incident” and that she was “in crisis and kicking the door and screaming at staff”. The memo also states: “Staff clear this was not her asking to get out, but demonstrating physical aggression.” It further records: “As incident happened at end of day, diaries had already been written – email to parents about incident didn’t happen because it wasn’t a high-scale incident.”
Jane says that Michelle’s experience at school left her a wreck. “She couldn’t do the simple things that she used to do, like go for a walk, because she was so anxious.” Michelle is now thriving at the complex/additional needs unit in her new, mainstream school and her parents feel they have their daughter back. It is more than 20 miles each way, but Jane says it is worth it. Michelle has not been restrained or secluded once.
More than once, Jane says that maybe she and Andrew were “thick” not to have realised what was going on; but they had assumed that Michelle would be treated at school with the same respect as their other child, who does not have special needs. “Children with special needs were not treated as equals in this school,” she says. “They were dehumanised.”
Jane says all her complaints to the council about the school have been upheld, except for one. Her voice rises with disbelief. “They said seclusion was good practice for Michelle, but we know just how traumatised she was by it.” A spokesperson for Scottish Borders council says: “To ensure our practice remains in line with national guidance, we have been working to develop a new inclusion policy. This includes clear guidance on seclusion and restraint.”
Last December, the Scottish children’s commissioner, Bruce Adamson, published No Safe Place: Restraint And Seclusion In Scotland’s Schools. His investigation concluded that all such incidents should be recorded and that parents or carers should be told “as soon as reasonably practicable”. It also recommended that the Scottish government should publish a “rights-based national policy and guidance” on restraint and seclusion in schools. The Scottish government is still considering its full response.
I trusted those people to look after my child and look what happened. I will always feel guilty
Meanwhile, in England and Wales, a review commissioned in 2011 by Michael Gove, then the education secretary, reached a very different conclusion. Gove asked Charlie Taylor, then the government’s adviser on behaviour in schools, to review the recording and reporting of the use of force in schools. Taylor’s report distinguished between mainstream schools, where the use of significant force is “extremely rare”, and special schools, where “some pupils, either due to a special need or because they have severe behaviour difficulties, can require more regular physical intervention”. He also stated that “special schools may have a different threshold for what is ‘significant’ force and they use their judgment to decide which incidents should be reported to parents”.
Taylor reported that obliging schools to record significant incidents of force could have a “negative effect” on the relationship between staff in special schools and parents. He said it would “add to the bureaucratic burden for some, but not all, schools”.
Taylor’s review did not cause an outcry at the time – perhaps because so few people knew about it. But campaigners today are appalled by its tone and its findings. They point out that it is impossible to know how widespread the restraint and seclusion of children is in schools, precisely because it has never been obligatory for schools to record and report it.
The Challenging Behaviour Foundation stresses that the inappropriate use of restraint is not an issue in all special schools. “We have examples of children who have moved from one special school, where staff said it was impossible to support their child without the use of restrictive interventions, to another where they are never used,” says Vivien Cooper, the charity’s chief executive. “So this is about leadership, school practice, staff skills and training, not the type of school.” There are alternatives to restraint. For example, Cooper says, if a child suffers from sensory overload, a teacher can move them to a less noisy or brightly lit area; non-verbal children can be taught signs or symbols to indicate that they need a break. “Schools using positive behaviour support report huge reductions in the use of restrictive interventions.”
The government finished consulting on draft guidelines to reduce the need for restraint for young people with special education needs and disabilities in January 2018. Last week, it finally published that report. It recommended that policies should be in place “for promoting positive relationships and behaviours and eliminating unnecessary and inappropriate use of restraint”, and that a system should be in place for the recording and reporting of incidents “where required”.
Campaigners are not impressed. “The guidance is non-statutory, does not cover mainstream schools – where we know much restraint and seclusion takes place – and does not require schools to inform parents if a restrictive intervention has taken place,” says Cooper. “It defends the use of restrictive practices such as seclusion rooms ‘as a disciplinary penalty’ and, unlike the equivalent adult guidance, fails to prohibit the use of prone restraint, which is known to pose significant risks. It is hard to square this with a stated commitment to children’s rights.”
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Make no mistake, Karen says: her son Adam is hard work. Adam is 14 and has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. He is potty-mouthed and has meltdowns galore, but she has never felt threatened by him. “He’ll hurl abuse at you or throw something, but he’d never actually attack anybody.” This made it all the more shocking when she discovered how many times Adam had been restrained soon after starting secondary school.
Like Michelle, Adam also has traits of PDA, as well as a sensory processing disorder that means he can’t stand being touched. It is five years since Karen gave him a proper hug. But, she says, that is just the way things are with Adam; the family has adapted. “Sometimes I ask him for a cuddle and he tells me to fuck off. The thing about Adam is that he says all the things we’d like to say but don’t. He’s got a brilliant sense of humour.”
Karen and her husband John live in a well-to-do part of Essex. Their home is large, comfortable and messy – as you might expect of a family with four young boys. The back garden is crammed with rabbit hutches, footballs and bikes. On the wall by the front door is a framed quote – the family maxim: “In this house, we do ADHD, we do meltdowns, we do tears and frustration, we worry and we stress, but we also hope for a better day and we persevere and we smile because in this house we don’t go down without a fight.”
Adam went to a mainstream primary school where he did OK. But after eight unhappy months at secondary school, Karen home-schooled him for a short period while a special school was found. He was eventually placed at a school in the county for children with social, emotional or mental health problems. Eighteen months on, he is still struggling after his brief experience there.
By the time he left, he had been excluded 14 times and restrained on 30 separate occasions, in the space of 12 weeks. Often he had been restrained several times in one incident. “It all looked really good at the start, but I wouldn’t put my dog in that school,” Karen says. “One day, Adam came home and hid in the garage. He looked like he’d gone 10 rounds in a boxing ring. He was covered in bruises and was completely traumatised. The longer this went on, the more restraints were being used. They told us about things he’d done and I was thinking: ‘Is it actually my child doing this?’ Because we’d never heard of such behaviours.”
Did she know about the restraint system before Adam started there? “I was asked to sign a form allowing them to restrain him. I refused, but they said he would be restrained anyway if necessary. But I never thought Adam would have to be. He used to go to army cadets, he played for a football team. We go to our caravan at the coast every weekend and he is never aggressive to any other children; he’s got loads of friends down there.”
Things came to a head in March 2018 when Karen received a call at 3.15pm telling her to go to school as there was a crisis. On her way there, she was passed by two police cars with their sirens blaring. After Adam had been restrained nine times that day, he had spat, kicked and thrown gravel at staff. The school called the police. When Karen arrived, Adam was standing on the playing field, hyperventilating and screaming. She tried to calm him down, but was told by police that she would be charged with obstruction if she didn’t get out of the way. Adam was then pinned down, handcuffed and put in a spit hood. “They took him to the station and me and my mum had to go and sit in custody with him till 1am,” says Karen. At the age of 12, Adam was convicted of criminal damage and six counts of actual bodily harm on staff, and given a reparation order – a non-custodial sentence supervised by a youth offending team.
He never went back to the school and has struggled since. He was recently excluded from another special school after being restrained. Karen fears that the 2018 incident has damaged Adam irreparably, as well as the family. “I trusted those people to look after my child and look what happened. I will always feel guilty for that.”
She sifts through the incident reports she obtained after making an FoI request, reading bits aloud. (Until today, her father had kept them because she could not face reading them.) Initially, her voice is calm and confident, but it soon begins to quiver. The details are shocking. In one incident, Adam was restrained for refusing to leave the school hall. “They are only supposed to restrain as a last resort. How can they say this is the last resort?” Karen says. Another report states that Adam said he could not breathe while being restrained. Karen is convinced that some of the staff simply didn’t know what they were doing. “They’ve done a short course on restraint and think they know it all. And they’re just damaging children.”
The incident that resulted in Adam being charged lasted five hours and involved multiple restraints. Karen can barely believe what she is reading. “Three hundred minutes! All day that’s going on and then my son got arrested and charged at 12 years old.” She reads on: “‘Adam becomes increasingly aggressive when a hold is implemented.’ Of course he does. He’s got a sensory processing disorder and touch is his main trigger. I don’t have to touch Adam, so why do they?”
Finally, she reads a document that shocks her into tears – a restraint she knew nothing about. She takes a moment to compose herself. “This is horrendous. ‘Adam found some rope. He climbed up a tree with it… [name redacted] asked Adam to give her the rope and come down from the tree. He said he was going to hang himself and put the rope around his neck.” She stops, wipes her tears and struggles to get her words out. “‘We asked him to remove the rope and give it to us. Adam then took the rope off and threw it over the fence.’” When Adam finally came down the tree, he was restrained again.
Karen throws down the document. “What is happening to a 12-year-old child that he is in a tree with a rope around his neck? This is pretty bad, isn’t it?” She exhales deeply, trying to catch her breath. “If we behaved like this to our kids, we wouldn’t have custody of them.”
A spokesperson for Essex county council said of the school: “Our last visit was in October 2018, and at that time all staff training was viewed to be up to date and in line with the behaviour policy. However, the safety and wellbeing of pupils in all Essex schools is paramount and when concerns are raised we will of course investigate when necessary.” The latest Ofsted report on the school, in January 2019, rated it as “good” and stated that procedures for the use of restraint were followed appropriately. The school added: “Parents/carers are informed every single time a child is restrained. Restrictive physical interventions are only used as a last resort, in order to keep the child and the people around them safe. All staff are fully trained in the use of management of actual or potential aggression techniques.”
Karen says the experience has taken a toll. “It’s smashed our marriage. This situation has been so fraught that I’m always on edge.”
When Adam started at the special school, he was meeting his academic targets and had not been in trouble with the police. Now, aged 14, he regularly goes missing, has a criminal record and still has the academic age of an 11-year-old. But Karen knows that, compared with some, he is lucky. “I’m a mum who’s quite intelligent and can say: ‘I’m not putting up with this’, but some parents have their own issues; they haven’t got the ability to stand up to these people. Who’s going to fight for those children?”
Back on the Dundee coast, Beth Morrison is preparing for the next stage of her battle. She has helped raised the funds to judicially review the secretary of state for education “in relation to the absence of a lawful statutory framework regulating the use of restraint of children” in Welsh and English schools. (She decided not to judicially review Scotland because she is confident it is on the brink of change.) All three claimants are children with disabilities who have experienced significant use of restraint at special schools in Wales, North Yorkshire and Essex. Beth argues that the current legislation discriminates against children with disabilities and is in contravention of the European convention on human rights.
It is nine years since her son returned from school traumatised, but she will not stop until she has got justice for him and other children like him. “Calum is no longer in education, but I will not walk away. I cannot sit here knowing that these cruel things are happening to our most vulnerable children, in the very place they should be kept safe.”
Some names have been changed.
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