BK retweeted
After the Green Party's "Zionism is Racism" vote, the Leader of Haringey Council, which is controlled by the Greens, wrote to various Synagogues in the borough to "reassure" them.
I want to show you Highgate Synagogue's reply. I believe it is worth reading in its entirety.
Synagogue rejects Green council leader’s attempt to ‘reassure’ them after “Zionism is Racism” vote
jewishnews.co.uk/synagogue-r…
BK retweeted
Long rant that will be interesting to almost no one but I’m really frustrated
I tried hiring someone to do decorating work for me
He has started the work and he’s efficient, reputable and highly recommended by locals… but Lloyds Bank nonetheless flagged my first payment to him as potential fraud
Fair enough.
Rang them up, and not for the first time with them, I found myself inside mirror world where I have to convince the bank to let me spend my own money
And I don’t mean we just have a bit of a chat and they say “oh that seems legit, alright”. I mean they ask endless questions and make you explain all the work you’re having done, why it costs what it does, and why you’re doing it too. As though they are your Mum and the money you have is just your allowance. Last time this happened AI decided my fate after I’d shown the man operating it a lot of documents. This time it was a real life human who got to make the call.
And yet I could not convince her to let me spend my money. She got me to tell her the endless details of the invoice, list all the jobs I was hiring him for, explain how I knew him, how I’d heard of him etc etc etc for about half an hour and then it was still a computer says no situation
I have to go into a branch and the fraud lady said I should take photos of previous work this man has done. So me and the bank manager are going to have fun looking at flooring and wallpaper I guess.
Then he can tell me if I’m allowed to pay this man for his work or not. Which is awful because how will I pay him now if they won’t let me?!
And if the concern is that he is a scam, then how is *me* rocking up at a bank with photos a solution anyway?
It is SUCH bullshit I swear. I have never been cost them money by fraud, or bought anything exciting enough to be suspicious. Yet here we are.
They’ve also now frozen my account until I visit but will kindly 🙄 lift the freeze to pay vital bills if I ring them each time
The nearest bank is half an hour away which sounds minor but with chronic illness, and an unwell mum I’m looking after at home, it actually isn’t to me
Surely the whole conversation should have simply gone…
Bank: we are worried it might be a scam
Me: it’s not and these are the reasons I’m sure it’s sound
Bank: well we are concerned and if you go ahead anyway and are scammed we won’t pay you back for it
Me: ok, I’d still like to go ahead. Thank you
End of discussion
After all they’d already made it clear they wouldn’t be liable for paying me back with this transaction. So why then do they care
They said “we want to protect our customers” and I said “this doesn’t feel protective. It feels like control”
If I want to spend my money on seventeen clown cars and a kazoo from the least reputable company in the world, they really ought to let me
I don’t see this as just the story of me trying to renovate something…which is, after all, a small story…
I see it as the story of how we are now treated, and how tightly controlled we are.
Your money, in your bank, is now yours only on a whim.
That will only get worse over time. And the more hoops it is acceptable to make us jump through, the more hoops they will feel entitled to make everyone jump through
In 2067 we will be justifying our flake 99’s at this rate
Let me just go shake my fist at a cloud. Nothing is like it was back in my day.
The lady was the perfect voice of bureaucracy, to a degree that really upset me because normally you can just talk to people.
One of her colleagues was so kind. He just couldn’t fix it because it had already been decided
Had to send a message to the decorator to explain the delay and he’s now continuing work on sheer trust. Which I don’t think he should have to do
BK retweeted
Disabled teen who scored a GCSE 9 in Spanish 'blocked' from studying his passion at college because he failed maths. When the Government bleats about NEETs, there is much more they could be doing to level the playing field liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liv…
BK retweeted
Couldn’t sleep last night so was reading my medical record, probably not the best thing to do 🤦🏻♀️ . Another failure I came across when I was struggling with eating and self harm.
Letter states: “he is fairly concerned about her as she is young, not responding to medication, has a BMI of <17, and exhibits symptoms suggestive of anorexia”
“he is sufficiently concerned and would like me to do blood tests and weigh ins on a fortnightly basis”
“He has stated he wants CMHT to assess this patient as this is their remit”
“I have contacted X hospital who will not see her as she is <18yrs.”
“CAHMS are not interested as she is not at school”
“I have cancelled her referral to the mental health gateway worker on the advice of Dr X as this patient requires a higher level of input”.
So many failures and I know fine well this still happens, especially to do with mental health and SH. Even doctors on the patients side can’t get through to other agencies.
The first agency that actually saw me in person told me “you weigh too much”.
I was less than 40kg and all I heard was “starve yourself more and then we will help you”
Why are children failed so badly? What can we even do to change this?
BK retweeted
Kaleb Cooper's mother is a dog groomer and his father is a carpenter. He inherited no land. He spreads ninety thousand tonnes of muck a year, cuts thirty thousand bales and runs eight hundred hectares of arable contracts.
Every argument about British farming starts from the assumption that the gate is bolted. Grass is making close to nine thousand pounds an acre. You inherit or you never get in. The whole trade is a closed shop in a wax jacket.
At thirteen he was handed three chickens and four acres. Within months it was four hundred and fifty hens and he was selling eggs to his own teachers. At fourteen he was breeding sheep and working on a dairy. At fifteen he spent five thousand pounds on a Case 1394 and two thousand on a topper, then knocked on the door of every house in the district with a horse and a scruffy paddock and told them their field would look considerably better mown.
Not one acre of it was his.
When Ukraine sent fertiliser vertical, he and Jack Tuckey spent a hundred thousand pounds on two spinning disc spreaders with not a single tonne booked to go through them. Then they went and bought the chicken muck nobody else wanted and put it on at variable rate.
That is the whole business. He sells the one asset in agriculture that has never required capital behind it, which is knowing how to do the work and turning up on the day he said he would.
Jeremy Clarkson's farm was already a customer before a camera was switched on. He was doing that ground when the previous farmer gave up. The programme did not discover him. It filmed him explaining a field to a man who had never drilled one.
Fourteen million people watched that and came away talking about the accent.
Land is the most expensive barrier in British farming. The tallest one is free, and nobody in the industry will say it out loud: we have spent thirty years telling every capable fourteen-year-old in the countryside that the way in is a degree, a placement and a graduate scheme, and they believed us.
There is a lad in your parish this morning who would do exactly what Kaleb did.
He is being told to finish his A-levels first.
BK retweeted
In 2013, the man who would become Anurag Mohindru KC told the panel interviewing him for a prestigious position 23 Essex Street that he had studied at Oxford. Asked for his CV so the claim could be checked, he edited it to say he had read medicine there for a year, and because he's a man of taste and saw that his fraudulent resume required some leavening texture he added a cricket blue he never won. After all, who ever heard of a less-than-well-rounded Oxford man?
The Bar's tribunal called Mohindru's false claim a "reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie", found he had "doubled down", and disbarred him.
On 3 July in the High Court, however, Mr Justice Johnson restored Mohindru to the practice of law with a sentence that deserves engraving above the door of every chambers in London: "It would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present."
'Merely.'
Mohindru is now is free to resume his career spent testing other people's honesty under oath.
It seems like Britain is running an epidemic of fraudulent self-invention at the moment, and running a second epidemic underneath it: the organised defence of the people caught doing it.
Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge chair and his Jesus College fellowship on 5 August, the day the university finally opened an investigation into his academic record. You've heard it all by now. The allegations, raised in July, are that passages of his thesis and published papers copy other scholars without attribution, and that celebrated elements of his life story sit awkwardly beside the available record.
He denies the lot; Liverpool John Moores examined the plagiarism claims against work done there and found "honest and reasonable error"; nothing is yet proven, and the investigation can take its course. Cambridge stood by him for weeks and, on the day he resigned, announced it would "continue to provide support to him". The Good Law Project circulated a letter, signed by more than 24 academics and politicians, describing the examination of a public academic's public record as a "smear campaign". Validating a man's CV is now an act of aggression, provided the man is the right sort.
Elsewhere, Zholia Alemi practised as an NHS psychiatrist for 22 years on a forged University of Auckland degree, having left her course in its 1st year. She detained patients. She was convicted of 20 offences of fraud and forgery in 2023, sentenced to 7 years, and has since been ordered to repay £406,624 of the £1m-plus she drew in salary. The forgery was exposed by a local reporter in Carlisle, who managed in an afternoon the check the General Medical Council had not performed in 22 years.
Still elsewhere, more than 700 healthcare workers have been guilty of obtaining or seeking UK nursing registration through tests sat by paid proxies at a single test centre in Nigeria; the investigation swept up nearly 2,000 nurses; hundreds of them stayed on wards while it ran; 48 were asked to sit the exam again. The scheme was described in the proceedings as fraud on an industrial scale, and the regulator processed it at the pace of a parish council.
And 2 weeks ago, on 24 July, Maidstone Crown Court gave Amran Hussain, 40, of Westerham, 4 years. Hussain applied for 2,071 NHS posts and landed 13 of them, worth £168,072.41, on the basis of him supposedly holding MSc degrees from Oxford and Birkbeck that nobody could verify, memberships of professional institutes that nobody could confirm, a directorship at an NHS trust he never held, and references supplied from NHS email accounts he himself controlled: the service wrote to ask whether Hussain could be trusted, and Hussain replied warmly that he could.
Once he got in-post he went off sick until each contract died; how laughably appropriate that his one sincere engagement with the NHS was its sickness policy. 4 years, richly deserved. Hussain had no college behind him, no chambers, no campaign group, no letter with 24 signatures.
The institutions doing the forgiving hold a doctrine. The CV may be a genre of self-marketing, and everybody may round the odd number up; but outright self-invention is quite another thing. Still, these places allow it. To them, dishonesty is just a lapse, an episode in a wellness journey, treatable with reflection and a statement about learning. Consequences are for outsiders.
To them, the audit and the reckoning is the real offence, to be called disproportionate, vindictive or racist according to the defendant's profile and connections. Who pays? The candidate who told the truth and came 2nd, 13 separate times, to Hussain. The junior barrister who put her real university on the form at 23 Essex Street. The patients detained on the judgement of a psychiatrist with 1 year of study and 22 of practice.
Do they know? The judge wrote "dishonesty is present" into the reinstatement itself. It is on the record in his own hand.
This must all end. It is a practice of formalised dishonesty not known in public life in these isles for centuries. It will not be brought back.
Progress's National Anti-Corruption Act stands up a 500-strong unit, the Malebranche, at the centre of government, with independent power to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime, procurement fraud and institutional corruption, and it pays whistleblowers up to 10% of recovered funds for exposing fraud inside public or private institutions, with criminal sanctions for any employer who retaliates. The first line of that policy reads: "If you're a white-collar criminal, there will be no worse place to be in Europe than Britain." We wrote the sentence before this summer's parade of the forgiven, and the parade has been making our argument for us ever since.
This country runs, hour by hour, on the honesty of people whose honesty is rarely if ever honoured, merely taken for granted: the electrician whose certificate is real, the nurse whose exam was her own, the accountant whose letters were earned.
Above them sits a class that treats truthfulness as a courtesy, extended and withheld among friends. A thoroughly Third World attitude. The defenders of the fraudulent are organised, lettered and funded. Organise against them. Progress is where that is being done, and the entry requirement is the one Mohindru failed: be what you say you are.
BK retweeted
During the Telford Inquiry it was revealed that the police allowed a "No-Go area where "South Asian pimps could sell under age prostitutes without any interference".
I hope that you and everyone else will repost this fact and remember the years "1997/2010" The Blair/Brown years.
BK retweeted
My latest investigation into the booming shadow care market, where councils send 100s of kids, reveals an absolutely shocking catalogue of potential safeguarding failures in one of the UK's largest illegal operators 1/2 thebureauinvestigates.com/st…
BK retweeted
on Arday. Cambridge are suffering reputational damage. They should. Remember Fishmonger Hall and their conduxt around Usman Khan? I want to go back to that. The same deluded progressive mindset there got Jack ans Saskia killed got Arday his chair
BK retweeted
I am a 64-year-old woman who just got fired from the only job I ever had and I am pretending it was a retirement.
I spent thirty-six years as an establishment mouthpiece. I asked the questions they wanted asked and called it journalism. I made people cry on television and called it a million minutes of live news. I grabbed a photographer by the throat in 2008 and Sky said I was provoked. I asked a serial killer's girlfriend if better sex would have stopped him murdering women. I told volunteers searching for April Jones that she was dead while they were still looking for her. I made Peter Andre weep about his children and said I did him a favour. I broke lockdown rules while lecturing the public and got suspended for six months. I came back. They finally showed me the door and I stood there calling it an honour.
You wrote all of this down in one tweet and the British public enjoyed reading it more than they ever enjoyed watching me.
I am mentioning my follower count because I have nothing else. I am calling you "young man" because I am old and irrelevant and this is the only power I have left. I am offering to "amplify" you because I am terrified that you have already amplified what I actually am and half a million people just saw it.
I said 68,000 complaints. I made that up. I hope you don't notice it was actually 1,800. I am clinging to "none were upheld" because a regulator once said I was technically legal while 55,000 people signed a petition to fire me. I have spent four decades being technically legal. I made that up too. I hope you don't notice that either.
I am the woman who asked Israel if they valued Palestinian lives less. I am the woman who asked a serial killer's girlfriend about her sex life. I am the woman who told volunteers their search was over while they were still hoping. I have no boundaries. I have only a microphone and a sneer and an establishment to protect.
Please have a lovely day. I am having a panic attack in an empty newsroom.
I am thirty-six years of cruelty with a Sky News logo and you just showed the receipts.
I am not the voice of Britain. I am the voice it was relieved to finally switch off.
You put a lot of effort into that tweet Christian to such a modest following. Let me amplify it for you to my half million+ followers.
You’re very welcome young man and I hope you have a lovely day.
Ps It was 68,000 complaints to Ofcom over my Alton Towers interview - none were upheld, to my knowledge x
BK retweeted
Imagine primary schools had started doing this before now. There would be uproar and rightly so. Picture the headlines!
But now we need to decide who is at risk of unemployment when they’re still children?
This is not our job.
🚨 NEW: Primary schools are set to be told to identify children at risk of being unemployed in the future
[@guardian]
BK retweeted
Professor JASON ARDAY told CBS News he "couldn't read or write until he was 18." Not struggled. Not certain words. COULDN'T READ OR WRITE.
He resigned from Cambridge today.
Channel 4 News, September 2023, his words. "In old money I was diagnosed with ASPERGER'S syndrome, which is commonly now referred to as autism."
Born 1985, diagnosed at three. That's 1988.
Asperger's didn't enter the ICD-10 until 1992, or the DSM-IV until 1994. It was in neither ICD-9 nor DSM-III. In 1988 there was no such diagnosis for a British clinician to give and he wouldn't have qualified anyway.
DSM-IV, criterion D, word for word. "There is no clinically significant general delay in language, for example single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years." Criterion E rules out delay in cognitive development.
ICD-10, F84.5. "In contrast to autism, there are no clinically significant delays in language or cognitive development."
That absence of language delay WAS the dividing line. It's the entire reason the category existed.
Now his own account. Non-verbal until eleven. Global developmental delay. Years of speech therapy. Sign language to communicate.
Every one an automatic exclusion. Not a judgement call. A definitional bar.
The diagnosis he named couldn't have existed in 1988, and couldn't have been given to the child he describes.
I'm not saying he isn't autistic. I'm saying his stories don't match each other and they keep growing. LJMU's page named two conditions. Wikipedia now lists autism, global developmental delay, DYSLEXIA and epilepsy. Dyslexia arriving late, once people started asking about his writing. He told The Times his dissertation errors came from lacking support for his autism and "complex learning disabilities."
So explain the BTEC.
LJMU's own page says he "defied all expectations by achieving a BTec and then a degree." A BTEC is two years of written coursework. He couldn't write before 18. He was at St Mary's by 20. There is no window.
Read at 18. Degree at 23. Doctorate at 31. Cambridge chair at 37. Truly one of the great minds of our time.
Then someone checked the thesis. 188 sentences belonged to someone ELSE, some carrying the original's COPY EDITING ERRORS across. He also took interview quotes from other researchers' papers and passed them off as his own subjects. That's not sloppy referencing. That's inventing EVIDENCE.
LJMU CLEARED him in March 2026, blaming "a depleted student supervision team." So the university blamed its own supervision and the man who supervised that PhD, Phil Vickerman, is now LJMU's PRO-VICE CHANCELLOR.
That clearance is what Cambridge hid behind for three years.
He also says a benign brain tumour was removed weeks before his viva, causing memory loss. No record of that either.
Glasgow and Ohio State now DENY any ongoing link. Those titles are still LIVE on his pages. Jesus College has opened its own investigation.
But forget Cambridge. Everyone's looking at the wrong university.
ST MARY'S, Twickenham. Their alumni page, live today, says he "came to St Mary's in 2005 to do an undergraduate degree, having learnt to read and write at the age of 18."
They admitted him, so they saw whatever he presented. No school named. No sixth form. No A levels. No Access course. His documented education begins at TWENTY.
They taught him three years, so they know what English walked in and what walked out. They gave the degree. Then a master's. Then, in 2024, an HONORARY DOCTORATE, when he was already famous.
That page claims £5.5m raised for over 80 charities, hedged as "part of several fundraising collectives and teams." Somebody wrote that hedge. Somebody knew.
The only verifiable record is a 2010 JustGiving page. £6,285. Pressed, he said it came from a syndicate of about a hundred people, under NDAs he couldn't name.
Cambridge inherited a CV others validated. St Mary's can't say that. They were FIRST and it isn't one education qualification. It's SIX. A BTEC, a degree, a master's, a PGCE, a teaching certificate, a doctorate. All in education.
A man who says he learned to read at 18 trained to teach children to read, then wrote a thesis on MENTORING student teachers.
The same man said POULTRY when he meant PALTRY in a keynote. Extraordinary range.
Then the rest.
He claimed he appeared on Seven Up. It first aired in 1964. He was born in 1985.
He claimed 600 miles in SIX DAYS. Do that maths. It means 1.86 metres per second, every second, for 518,400 seconds straight. No sleep. No food. No stopping. Six days of legs on a 24/7 shift. The maths says 1.86 metres a second. Biology says absolutely not. That claim later became twelve days.
He claimed a pig's head was sent to his parents. The Guardian asked the butchers he named. No police officer ever came in about a pig.
He claimed a masked man confronted him twice, knife the second time, telling him to resign. Enhanced CCTV caught NOTHING. He hit the panic alarm, the security team was on site, nobody came. He told no colleagues, then ran a PhD viva two hours later. A police FOI found no matching reports.
When it started unravelling, Times Higher Education had 63 pages ready in September 2025. His lawyers sent ONE letter. No lawsuit. The story stayed buried TEN MONTHS.
So you were never told. That was the point.
His New York Times interview was cancelled. Simon and Schuster scrubbed the financial claims from the memoir. It still publishes on 11 August.
Meanwhile he sat on the NHS Race and Health Observatory group. ITV's Cultural Advisory Council. Trustee of Runnymede for eleven years. Named on UKRI and NIHR funded research, your money. Guest Editor of Radio 4's Today programme and Patron of the Adult Literacy TRUST.
His story was so inspiring that six universities, the BBC, the Guardian and a publisher all repeated it. Not one checked it.
Turns out that was the clever bit.
He didn't beat the system. The system never LOOKED. It wanted the story too badly to check it.
Cambridge is investigating now, three years late, and only because journalists did their job for them and when it was finally all put to him, he said this.
“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”
They did believe him. For twenty years.
That was the whole plan.
St Mary’s page is still up. £5.5m and all.
Check it before it disappears.
BK retweeted
The trouble is, NHS trusts pool their funds to support legal advice. There's no sense of direct accountability for the board members involved, it's all 'insured' (ie, they're insulated from accountability). I think individual pension entitlements should be put on the table.
"Information Commissioner in Scotland, David Hamilton, has told NHS Fife to make its 2024 Trans Policy available to the public under Freedom of Information Act
NHS Fife has refused to release the document, citing a number of exemptions, all rejected by Commissioner"
genderblog.net/nhs-fife-orde…
BK retweeted
Mohamed Abdulraziq dragged a five-year-old girl off the street and sexually assaulted her.
When I referred his sentence to the Government as unduly lenient, the minister disagreed.
That minister - Ellie Reeves - has just been made Attorney General.
teapawt.net/NJ_Timothy/status/2041…
BK retweeted
The state continues its overriding of parenthood and the natural family by targeting the vulnerable.
This is all part of a deeply worrying trend. Breakfast clubs, childcare from 9 months, comprehensive sexuality education, queer theory and promoting surrogacy in relationship lessons, school therapists, ‘socially transitioning’ kids in school, LGBT lunch clubs, the puberty blocker trials, the draft conversion practices bill, decriminalising abortion up to full term… do you see it yet? The state is attacking the natural family, parenthood and childhood. It is truly sinister.
Bridget Phillipson has called for benefits claimants who are not working to be given free childcare.
“There are families out there who can’t afford quality childcare because they aren’t working, and they struggle to work because they can’t afford quality childcare"
🔗: telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07…
BK retweeted
The reality of how much of a dangerous situation me and my family are in really hit me this morning.
I woke up in agony in my kidney and had to ring and ambulance. While dealing with that (had to have gas and air, the pain was so bad) I glanced at my phone and saw a comment from a fake account that has been giving me abuse online for weeks (including defending my abusers and accusing me of making everything up) asking if "i liked my burger and chips".
Now this comment alone would not normally be concerning but, the fact that we did actually have burger and chips delivered late last night confirmed what I had been fearing. Me, my family and my house are already being watched.
We are already working on moving ASAP but it is clear we need to get out as soon as possible.
The fear i had this morning having to leave my kids to be taken to hospital in an ambulance while I know horrible violent gangs of men are stalking my house has broken me.
We should not have to live like this because of my abusers being released after a fraction of their sentence. All it has done is ebouldened them because in reality, they have git away with what they did to me as a child, again, thanks to the very people that are supposed to protect me.
I have been reporting this escalation since febuary now and not been taken seriously and its now at the point where we are being watch and stalked and are in immediate danger.
I have had so much help already this last week to tey get moved but we are still struggling to get out as quickly as we need because we are not financially in a position to deal with this. I was supposed to have years yet to prepare for this, that has now changed to weeks.
To help please consider donating through my links. A go fund me is in the process of being made aswell.
Victims of grooming gangs around the country are having to deal with the consequences of the new sentencing act and are all in extreme danger. Kier starmer needs to change his plans on early release of child rapists immediately because people are going to get harmed or even dies and he will have our blood on his hands.
And West yorkshire police and other police services around the country need to start taking these issues seriously. These are dangerous men. We deserve to be safe. We were not protected as children, the least they can do is protect us as adults and protect our children from these dangerous men.
Please help me get out of here before anything happens. Right now I do not even feel safe in my own home. I spend all night listening and waiting for someone to come and ever day things are getting worse. My physical health is now facing the brunt of it and im not sure how much more I can take
buymeacoffee.com/fionagoddar…
paypal.me/Fionagoddard361
BK retweeted
This has had nearly 1500 signatures in the first 24 hours. Thank you so much for supporting this. Can I please ask that you continue signing and sharing
A few weeks ago, I submitted a petition which has now been accepted, and I’m finally able to share it.
Many people will be aware that, recently, members of a grooming gang in Huddersfield were sentenced for the abuse of children. One of the offenders was convicted of “controlling prostitution”, despite the victims being children at the time.
In my own case, in 2019, one perpetrator was convicted on two counts of “child prostitution”.
Children cannot be prostitutes. What happened was child sexual exploitation and child rape.
The government has already acknowledged that the term “child prostitute” is unacceptable by quashing convictions that victims themselves received under such laws. Yet this language still persists within the legal system.
When perpetrators are convicted of offences using terminology linked to prostitution, it risks implying that the child was somehow a willing participant rather than what they truly were: a victim. This language is deeply harmful and reinforces the stigma and victim-blaming that survivors of child sexual abuse continue to face.
The word “prostitution” should never be used in any context relating to the sexual abuse or exploitation of children.
Please sign my petition to help end the use of this language across all areas of child sexual abuse. Children are never prostitutes. They are victims, and the law should reflect that.
You can sign the petition through this link:
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
Ive included screen shots of the convictions and you can access the full articles through these links.
Nine men, guilty of abusing two girls, jailed for total of 132 years | ITV News Calendar itv.com/news/calendar/2019-0…
Twenty people jailed for sexual abuse committed decades ago in Kirklees | West Yorkshire Police westyorkshire.police.uk/news…
Also if you would like to help me continue the work im doing around child sexual abuse and exploitation please consider donating below:
buymeacoffee.com/fionagoddar…
BK retweeted
For several months, a vulnerable child (not my own) lived in our home.
We didn’t ask the local authority for financial support. We asked for education and engagement.
What shocked me was that the LA’s youth worker appeared to focus on opening a bank account and preparing for Universal Credit, whilst education remained unsecured.
This was despite the local authority’s own Child in Need assessment recording that the child had received a Conclusive Grounds decision through the National Referral Mechanism as a victim of modern slavery, alongside ongoing concerns about exploitation.
When I formally complained about the lack of education, the council upheld my complaint and apologised for failing to provide it.
But by then, valuable time had already been lost. Their life within our home had collapsed as we could no longer carry the increasing risk.
During my work on youth provision with the #OU’s Open Justice Policy Clinic, I saw youth work described as building relationships, trust and opportunities.
What I witnessed here felt very different.
A vulnerable teenager saying “no” appeared to become the end of the discussion rather than the beginning of a more creative effort to engage them.
Somewhere along the way, safeguarding seems to have become confused with simply accepting a vulnerable teenager’s wishes.
Whilst respecting autonomy is important, when a child is out of #education, at risk of exploitation and known to services, can we really call it #safeguarding if we simply accept their decision to disengage?
We are failing some of our most vulnerable young people.
BK retweeted
This story hits every cliche: brothers involved in grooming, drug/weapons dealing, local councils, social work, gangster taxi driver gets stabbed while being the director of a (probably local council funded) anti knife crime charity.
And the cherry on top:
Labour candidate and youth worker among three brothers jailed for grooming abuse crimes
gbnews.com/news/labour-candi…
