The Kerelaw Scandal
Glasgow City Council's mismanagement of Kerelaw School
The running of Kerelaw Residential School by Glasgow City Council was questionable to say the least.
From at least 1999, Glasgow City Council has wanted to shut the school and run the place down in a number of ways. They ignored the findings of a 2001 HM Inspectorate of Education report, which reviewed the safety aspects of the school, staffing levels (which were found to be far too low) and the general repair of the place. All of these findings were directly linked with external management and had nothing to do with the managers and staff that worked at Kerelaw. Indeed, in the same report, Kerelaw staff were praised, and the pupils were also commended for their friendliness and openness toward others.
Another HM IE inspection was carried out in April 2003 and Glasgow City Council had addressed none of the findings of the 2001 report. This led to a follow up inspection. The findings of the follow up report slated Glasgow City Council for the way the Open School was staffed and run, but praised the Secure Unit. This report was made public on 15th October 2003, the same day that Glasgow City Council called a meeting to announce the closure of the Open School and to ask if the Scottish Executive would take over the running of the Secure Unit.
It was at this time that a "whistleblower" alerted the Council to allegations of child abuse, bad management practices and claims of bullying and harassment of staff by senior managers. This led to a social work investigation carried out by certain members of the Council. Reading through the investigation documents raises a number of questions:
- Why did the investigating team choose to believe the same small group of inexperienced staff members time and time again? The majority of experienced staff members, including those worked within the school as well as Council staff who worked out with the school but visited on a weekly basis, had found none of the "whistleblower's" allegations to be true over a number of previous years.
- Why did the investigating team choose to ignore requests from staff members for certain documents that could have helped them fight their cases and help prove certain allegations were untrue?
- Why did the Council choose to believe a "whistleblower" who had a track record of making complaints about senior members of staff? A "whistleblower" who had a number of complaints regarding work practices from colleagues and who went on to be found out in court to have coached a vulnerable ex-pupil of Kerelaw into making allegations.
One of the policies that Glasgow City Council has while carrying out investigations is that no employee may contact any member of staff under investigation and vice versa. This may seem like a common sense policy, but when they go on to tell members of staff that allegations have been made against them but will not disclose what these are or who has made them, that becomes a different story. There is proof from the initial fact finding investigation that some members of staff went for up to 11 weeks without knowing anything about the allegations made against them. This caused undue stress, fear and alarm for the staff members involved and did not give them time to defend themselves. This practice is still ongoing and has led to a Divide and Conquer strategy.
We would urge all Kerelaw staff to contact us. We have to stand together and fight otherwise staff will be picked off one by one.
On Saturday 3rd of June, an article was placed in The Glasgow Herald that John Muldoon had received a written warning in 2000 for groping a 15 year old girl at Kerelaw. This is totally false and we have been told by The Herald that the source of this article was Glasgow City Council. Why would the Council stoop to such depths and tell lies about an ex colleague, causing John and his family and friends more heartache and grief on top of what they already have to endure. At least the "victims" had an excuse of sorts for telling lies, compensation. What is Glasgow City Council's excuse?