Former teacher guilty of sexually abusing and murdering baby boy he wanted to adopt - CPS

It's too horrific and shockingly unbelievable to process.
I am so sorry for the poor baby
RIP precious angel
I hope the 2 predators die in prison.

Well, therin lies the crux of the matter, sadly. Multiple factors and catastrophic for poor Preston.

It’s sickening I can’t fathom anyone dong this to a baby.
How did two sick perverts get their hands on him …😢

Yes, definitely: it seems to have been a collective failing, with social workers, hospital staff, the sister & the work colleague all overlooking red flags.

I agree, which is why we're not just talking about one person but joined up thinking. Which i'd be pretty certain will be a major theme that comes out of this.

For instance, yes, I agree that some of this should have been flagged up to SW.

Safeguarding is everyone's responsibility. As many on this particular board know, you either get this or you don't.

'The red flag to me is "dead meat". As well as basic red flag and pattern recognition, which a great many of us are familiar with, even if it seems that sadly a number of the professionals in Preston's case were not.'

-That terrible comment was made by Vardy to his sister. How could the social workers have known about the comment unless she reported it? The sister is the one at fault here.

The social workers seem to have made serious errors in other aspects.

Er, yes it absolutely is.

Fucking hell.

I'd have thought so...

I do think comments mentioning disturbing things the murderers said are overlooking that at least some of these comments were not made to social workers (unsurprisingly) so could not have been flagged up.
The comment about 'dead meat' was made to one of the men's sisters- how could the social workers have known about this comment unless she reported it?

Similarly, the comment about dark thoughts about harming Preston was made to a work colleague: why did they not report it?

Otoh I am surprised these 3 injuries were all dismissed : why were the videos accepted as evidence unquestioned?

Preston is rushed to Blackpool Victoria Hospital at 11:10, floppy and unresponsive with Varley reporting a seizure and breathing difficulties.

Nursing staff notice bruising to Preston's head.

A medical report states Preston had "unexplained injuries, inconsistent with a version of events given…"

Hospital safeguarding are informed and social services and Lancashire Police called.

Following discussions with medical staff, the bruises to a baby learning to walk are not regarded as suspicious.

30 June, 2023

At about 20:25, Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley take Preston to Blackpool Victoria Hospital A&E Department, reporting the child has a rash, diarrhoea, vomiting and high temperature.

Medics note bruising to Preston's head, but staff are shown a home video of the child pulling a toy box on to himself while playing, by way of explanation.

Varley comments: "You lot are going to think we have been abusing him or something."

It is later discovered the toy box video was filmed 12 days earlier.

6 July, 2023

Varley takes Preston to hospital at 10:40 for third time with injury to his left arm.

He said it was sustained while putting him in his cot the previous evening.

After an X-ray, a cast is applied for a fractured elbow.

The child's social worker, Amy Shepherdson, who had been in contact with the hospital, texted Varley to say: "Just to reassure you they said they had absolutely no concerns. U absolutely did the right thing."

She visits the home and notes Preston had a "very sad face and a little cry"

I do think Preston's case will impact the future though. Screening is one area, how challenging is it, is it tailored or standard? Do any criteria need changing? Does the hospital warnings procedure work the same way in every case? - what weight is given to different professionals, to timescale etc? Do you need to change the nature of monitoring of a pre-verbal child, should monitoring and help be arranged differently? Does the brief of the child's soc worker versus the parents' sw need looking at? Just examples.

Certainly the case should add something to professional awareness: two professional financially sound men, one with safeguarding accreditations who worked with kids, super 'gay daddies' adopted a baby and did this - their believability shouldn't have rested on any of these factors, professionals should have been actively enquiring, pushing if needed. Also, the pattern of injuries to Preston that failed to flag more than parent-controlled visits should now be in professional memory-banks and there should be discussion about what triggers a full medical exam in a pre-verbal child.

Yes, it absolutely should. As @AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment has pointed out, there's been DECADES of research on not only shaken baby syndrome but other risk factors and things to watch out for, it has long been known and it has long been a feature of good safeguarding protocol. Whether it's being followed or people who should be aware of it are aware of it and why they aren't or it isn't is another matter. Literally none of this is "new".

Nobody was saying, btw, that merely mentioning sleep deprivation in itself was a "red flag". That's normal in new parents and not the smoking gun in those text messages. The red flag to me is "dead meat". As well as basic red flag and pattern recognition, which a great many of us are familiar with, even if it seems that sadly a number of the professionals in Preston's case were not.

It's quite useful, for those not familiar with the detail, to look at the timeline (warning: it is pretty stark and upsetting).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621ky4e52xo

It should be fairly obvious to most, I'd have thought, where some of the gaps were. Remember also, that the professionals are SUPPOSED to be trained to recognise this stuff. Being able to spot red flags is really nothing new, and again, you don't need proof that something definitely IS wrong, just enough concern and curiosity to look deeper.

It’s not a gotcha comment. It is a reflection that a great many people most vocal about how this is all the result of some awful wokeness will have voted for the cuts that make failures much more likely.

Isn’t a broken arm in a child of Preston’s age extremely unusual?

I don't think it's unreasonable to discuss what might be done after Preston, in changing professional practice or screening / monitoring adoptive parents - it's not about attacking either group, it's about supporting as much as anything. Adoptive parents should not be being left to struggle.

The context is the services' understaffing and funding issues which are big, structural problems. The unspoken context is that it is, and always has been, hard to get people to take on others' children. People like the idea that society looks after them, but in a more abstract way, hence the historic catastrophic failures in children's homes and children's charities. People in general don't feel the same way about others' children as they do about their own and are glad to be told someone else is taking care of things.

I do think Preston's case will impact the future though. Screening is one area, how challenging is it, is it tailored or standard? Do any criteria need changing? Does the hospital warnings procedure work the same way in every case? - what weight is given to different professionals, to timescale etc? Do you need to change the nature of monitoring of a pre-verbal child, should monitoring and help be arranged differently? Does the brief of the child's soc worker versus the parents' sw need looking at? Just examples.

Certainly the case should add something to professional awareness: two professional financially sound men, one with safeguarding accreditations who worked with kids, super 'gay daddies' adopted a baby and did this - their believability shouldn't have rested on any of these factors, professionals should have been actively enquiring, pushing if needed. Also, the pattern of injuries to Preston that failed to flag more than parent-controlled visits should now be in professional memory-banks and there should be discussion about what triggers a full medical exam in a pre-verbal child.

It's reasonable to ask if anything more could have been done, catastrophies should shake up professional ideas, but there are of course two degenerate people who are on the hook in Preston's case.

Absolutely. Which is why people suggesting that the fact that they were complaining about being sleep deprived should have been a red flag for social workers are wide of the mark.

Lots of adopters struggle. Lots of adopters express that struggle. Lots of adopters express that struggle in terms we're not particularly proud of. My argument is not that that makes us child rapists or murderers, it is that it is impossible to treat that as a red flag.

Of course, a well funded post-adoption support service could actually spend time supporting the 99.99% of us who will struggle on while doing the best for our children, and in the process may well uncover some of the 0.01% who will go further (whether out of tragic cases of desperation, or heinous cases of evil).

I think so too.

Sorry, that was supposed to be answering @AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment ’s post.

These people were not baby rapists because they were sleep deprived though. They brought an entirely new layer of depravity to the process of adopting a baby.

Incidentally, I wonder if they even had the most rudimentary knowledge of how to care for a baby?

Other risk factors, by the way, that people mentioned upthread are not actually risk factors.

For example, an adoptive parent getting in the bath with their young child. Not only is that in itself not considered inappropriate, it is a pretty common way to encourage bonding and attachment.

The suggestion that something that would be perfectly normal when biological parents do it become a red flag when adoptive parents do it is to misunderstand what adoption is. We are not babysitters on behalf of the state.

The problem is that when you have social services as stretched as they are after 16 years of local authority budgets being absolutely eviscerated, then of course social workers are going to have to weigh up risk factors when deciding what they need to prioritise.

I don't know enough to know if they missed those risk factors in this case - but those saying that struggling with sleeplessness and using weird language should be a red flag don't, I think, get the reality that lots of adoptive families live in every day. LOADS of adoptive families are in crisis. There simply isn't the support available to deal with the complex needs of adopted children. Social workers investigating every adoptive family who is struggling, or has expressed that struggle to friends, would mean investigating about a quarter of adoptive families.

So yeah - if you're a social worker and you're faced with a case list as long as your arm, and it includes a couple who have been through vetting who have expressed that they're struggling with sleep or twenty families with a history of violence and neglect, you probably are going to focus your efforts elsewhere.

The answer of course is to reverse the massive slashing of council budgets and put in place a genuine and well funded post-adoption support service. But I wonder how many Daily Mail quoting posters on here voted Tory/will vote Reform and contributed to the pressure social services are under.

If you read the Office of National Statistics annual homicide reports, each report finds that the highest risk age group for homicide is babies under one year old. It is the same for the most recent report: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025

Really wish some posters would educate themselves about the adoption process before posting about it.

This was never a 'choice' between Preston's grandmother or two gay men.
There was, first, a choice between placing Preston for adoption or opting for a special guardianship arrangement with his grandmother. From experience, SWs will almost always try to place children with birth family. But that is not always possible and there will be reasons for that that none of us are privy to. Do we know that the sibling didn't have any additional needs or was there certainty that Preston wouldn't have additional needs, for example, that might render a 60+ year old woman with cancer unable to cope with parenting a child until she was nearly 80. That is a decision not just made by Social Workers - it was a decision by a judge.

We don't know there was a 'choice' between gay adopters and straight adopters. We simply don't know what the matching process was like for Preston. The notion that because he was a baby there would have been lots of prospective adopters just isn't reflective of individual circumstances. Our son was in foster care from birth until he was 2. Lots of initial interest but then that came to nothing because of some uncertainties about his health. We were the first and only adoption applicants that weren't put off by that. We have no idea what specific uncertainties or needs Preston may have had that will have impacted the pool of adopters that felt able to pursue a match.

All of those saying that gay men and single men should not be permitted to adopt children need to explain what that would have meant for the nearly 4,000 children adopted by gay couples and single men over the last twenty years.

At the end of 2025, there were 2,060 children in active family finding stages of adoption, but only 680 adoptive families also in active family finding.

We know that adoption provides much better outcomes for children that years of instability in the care system. Exacerbating that shortage because of extreme and heinous cases like this is a dreadful approach to protecting children.

I think you’re right. But I also think there’s a lot of yelling down about it - you probably have heard the there’s not a paedo round every corner you know! insistence - there bloody is!

@AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment - I’m familiar with Arthur’s case and many others. Awful.

I don’t disagree with

a) remembering that child abusers are found in every single social stratum and,
b) being alert to signs of abuse, particularly when risk factors are already present

I’m not sure anybody could. My pondering is really if this would have saved Preston. After all, children and toddlers do break limbs, they do get unwell, they are taken to hospital. I haven’t followed the case as closely as some but my understanding is that Preston was twice admitted with illness and once with a broken arm and this doesn’t seem abnormal to me.

So then if we say that if there are risk factors (being an adoptive parent? being a man?) involved then extensive checks are carried out but this may lead to children not taken to hospital at all, either because their parents want to hide something or because they are anxious that a genuine accident would look sinister.