Opinion: allegations deserve an independent investigation

Newtown residents will have seen news of ongoing problems at Ysgol Robert Owen (formerly Ysgol Cedewain), which is facing a massive budget shortfall and had proposed to make staff redundant in response, proposals which thankfully appear to have been dropped.

Members of the National Education Union (NEU) Cymru at the school had then asked their union to ballot them for industrial action in turn.

Staff at the special school, which cost £22 million and opened only on 1 September last year, had been told that one in six of them were facing redundancy due to a projected shortfall of £316,610 by the end of this month, rising to nearly £1 million by 2027.

Powys County Council then denied that these redundancies would “create an unsafe environment for learners and staff”, claiming wider financial pressures. Regrettably, however, constituents including ex-staff and parents have impressed upon me that this unsafe environment is already a reality.  

In December, I called on the Education Workforce Council (EWC), Wales’s regulator for the education sector, to undertake an independent investigation into serious and consistent allegations of institutionalised bullying at Ysgol Robert Owen. 

After extensive correspondence since last summer with the constituents that form the Cedewain Victims Group, I am under the impression that the threat of these redundancies appears to be intimately connected with allegations of at least 30 staff, pupils, and parents being systematically bullied by senior figures at the school.

The racking up of the deficit and those serious bullying allegations are not occurring in a vacuum. While the financial situation facing schools in Powys is dire, claims that plans for those specific redundancies had been forced on the council due to county-wide budgetary pressures are unfortunately missing the full picture at Ysgol Robert Owen specifically. 

After all, are all schools in Powys declaring the need to make this many redundancies? It would be interesting to see whether any other of Powys’s roughly 90 schools are needing to even countenance cutting such a high proportion of staff.

Affected constituents have complained that bullied staff have already been engineered out of the school onto long-term sick pay suspensions or departure packages, contributing to the school’s considerable deficit.

Constituents have shared with me minutes from a 2023 meeting of the Governing Body of the school, which anticipated a budget surplus within two years, and noting that “staff issue’s” [sic] being resolved would further improve the school’s finances. This appears to amount to an implicit acknowledgment of this link. 

Following correspondence with the council, Welsh Government, and the Children’s Commissioner, and given the potential safeguarding concerns owing to the school’s Additional Learning Needs pupil body, it is my belief that the severity of the allegations warrant an out-of-county, independent investigation. I have been assured by the EWC that they are looking into this.

It is my moral duty as the MP for these constituents to speak up on their behalf and ensure their concerns are heard when evidenced. We have seen so many scandals come to light in recent years with ordinary people being failed by our institutions. I dealt with many cases of endemic bullying and engineered suspensions in my years as a teacher trade unionist, but never this bad. 

For the hard-working staff who have dedicated their careers to the most vulnerable in society, for the children and parents themselves, and for the proper use of public money, light must be shed on what has gone wrong at Ysgol Robert Owen and I will be continuing to use every avenue possible to make sure the matter is resolved appropriately.

Steve Witherden MP
Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr