Former Buxton school pupil speaks about alleged abuse

Leon was a teenager when he was sent to a children’s home now at the centre of allegations of physical, sexual and mental abuse.

Now 44, he is one of more than 40 survivors suing councils for damages in a civil case.

Norfolk County Council, which licensed The Small School at Red House in Buxton, near Aylsham, has received several “letters of action”, a formality required before court action can be taken.

Other local authorities are facing legal action for placing children at the facility.

Leon told the BBC how abuse was normalised, claiming it led him to commit an act of violence that put him in prison.

This is his story in his own words.

At the time, I was a problem child for my local authority and I was under the impression I was going there [to Red House] because it could offer me an education; it could offer me everything I couldn’t be offered where I was from.

But it didn’t turn out like that, for me and many others.

I was a child and I was being physically hurt by an adult and they didn’t care about us.

We would be pinned on the floor. We would be punched. We would be scratched. We would have our legs tied behind our backs.

If we were on the floor, you’d have a knee in your side, you’d have a teacher’s elbow across your neck and then other kids wanted to jump on you just to be involved because they were teachers’ pets.

So the kids that were helping the teachers were being rewarded, even if it was just an extra £5 pocket money or extra free cigarettes… they were all happy to get involved.

Maybe I got away with it quite lightly because I was quite a big lad. I had friends in the school, but those friends would soon turn on you if there was an extra five cigarettes a day and the teachers said ‘Go and sort them out.’

We used to have a telephone booth which had a little counter on it so we were able to ring our parents or social services, but [the calls] were all monitored.

My mum came to the school and I said ‘Please take me home with you’ and she wouldn’t. Everybody thought we were lying – this place was all hunky dory. Well, it wasn’t. We were being abused, and very physically abused as well.

There’s so many people – not myself, I’m a strong lad and I carry on – that I’m in contact with that have got a bad life.

They don’t know any other way of life… They can’t leave the Red House behind.

This is one of the reasons why we have to have closure… because people just can’t move on. They’re stuck in the past and that’s not fair on them.

I want someone held accountable for why some of us are the way we are. I’ve had a really bad life myself, but this stems from the school.

It took me a long time to realise wrong isn’t right and right isn’t wrong.

I’ve done some bad things in my life that I’m not proud of, but when you’re being brought up to be that, that’s ok. You can be rewarded for that and you don’t know any different.

The school was shut down in 1998. I was placed back into a children’s home in Oxford and by the time I was 16 I discharged myself from care… and I was out to cause misery to every single person that crossed my path, because that’s the life I’d been brought up in.

I have been abusive to people. I have been arrested for things I’m not proud of being arrested for.

I’ve tried to make amends as the years have gone on but that was the sort of life we were being brought up in.

I didn’t have an adult figure in my life as a child to show me what was right and wrong.

I’ve been through the justice system up until I was 27. I did my last prison sentence in 2007, and from then I’ve just tried to keep my head down and hold down a job and just be a normal person.

Had I not been there [at the Red House], I may have been a different person.

My past has come back to bite me on the backside too many times and I don’t want to live that life any more.

I want to be a normal bloke where people like me and [do] not associate me with being the bad person that I was.

I still see my mum… She says when she used to come to see me that the teachers used to say we were off doing this or that, so they couldn’t see us.

But my mum now believes something happened. She’s apologised immensely, knowing she couldn’t do anything about it because I was under the care of social services.

It’s taken a lot for her to understand it [and] it helped when I got my social services reports; that she got to see some of the things that happened in the school.

So now we are being believed, it’s a bit of a relief.

A Norfolk County Council inspection report, seen by the BBC, said the school was registered as a children’s home in August 1992.

The report, based on an inspection carried out in April 1994, said that since June 1992 there had been 16 reported incidents of suspected abuse of children there.

These comprised seven incidents of suspected sexual abuse and nine of suspected physical abuse or inappropriate restraint, involving 20 children in all.

In a statement, the council said it did not place any of the claimants in the case at Red House.

Confirming it had received 14 “letters before action”, it said: “The allegations made by former pupils of the independent Small School at Red House are deeply concerning and we have co-operated fully with investigations, which relate to children that were placed there by other local authorities more than 30 years ago.

“Our thoughts are with all survivors of abuse but as there is an ongoing legal claim we cannot comment further.”

Red House was operated by Tvind, a controversial Danish-based group founded in the 1960s that has been embroiled in financial scandals since the 1990s.

However, a company of the same name that provides teacher training told the BBC it was unrelated to the business that ran Red House.

“We are unable to provide comment as we have no status in relation to the former Tvind School Co-operation, and we are not aware of any legal action,” it said.