New disclosures from my excellent Exaro News colleague Nick Fielding reveal that paedophile MP Sir Cyril Smith backed taking the troubled Knowl View special school in Rochdale out of local authority control.
His story based on hitherto unseen official papers shows that Rochdale Council narrowly missed losing local authority control of the school where children were sexually assaulted and the MP was a governor and a regular visitor.
Martin Digan, a care worker at Knowl View, tried to blow the whistle about the abuse. He had just become acting head of care at the residential school for boys with learning difficulties and behavioural problems.
He told Exaro: “It was Smith who was pushing for the school to be controlled by its governors – outside of the local council’s control.”
“It would have become nothing short of a sweetshop for paedophiles.”
Luckily in 1992 under the Tory government of Sir John Major that would have been extremely unusual and the scheme came to nought.
Fast forward 20 years and such a move is commonplace and nobody would question it. Would a present Tory education secretary now refuse such a proposal for Sir Cyril Smith like Jimmy Savile was an extremely popular and respected figure at the time and nobody publicly knew anything about his appalling private life? I doubt it.
But the reason I have singled out Michael Gove is that he is actively opposing any statutory reporting of child sexual abuse to the police by teachers or other people in authority in the schools system. He has said so in a letter to his former Cabinet colleague Cheryl Gillan.
This to me seems madness when at the same time he is freeing up the education system and allowing anybody to set up a school and wants every school out of local authority control as soon as possible. He is also encouraging unqualified teachers.
Now either Michael Gove takes the view that teachers are so decent that they could not possibly harm any child ever or he doesn’t really care what happens. I doubt he is one of the small minority of Tory libertarians who believe child sex is fine. In my view after studying the very duplicitous and nasty way some paedophiles behave,he has opened the door to make child sexual abuse more prevalent in the education system and put more children at risk. He could soon get a rude awakening, far worse than the present troubles at a badly run Al-Madinah school in Derby.