School governors told to ‘dismiss’ grooming gangs concerns

[NoNever]

Article in the Telegraph.

Quote “ School governors have been encouraged to dismiss concerns about grooming gangs as “disinformation”, The Telegraph can disclose.
Thousands of governors undergoing safeguarding training this year were presented with a scenario involving rumours of “men belonging to a particular religion” committing “violent crimes against women”.
They were asked to identify the scenario as an “online safety risk” because children were spreading “disinformation”.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/04/school-governors-told-to-dismiss-grooming-gangs-concerns/

This is infuriating. For decades girls were told to shut up about grooming gangs and this is the training school governors are being provided in 2025.

Isn't this training supposed to be about protecting children from the dangers of believing unsupported allegations spread online? If it had been about an allegation that vaccinations cause autism, would the MP have said "it's concerning that, rather than seeing the scenario as an opportunity to discuss vaccine safety, governors are only given negative options to shut debate down"?

It's not shutting debate down to tell people not to believe everything they read without supporting evidence. But the example was ill-chosen, and I wonder why.

A GovernorHub spokesman said the question was designed to test knowledge of online safety risks to students, but that the use of an example that alluded to grooming gangs was “inappropriate”.

The 5,000 governors who have already completed the training will be contacted to inform them of the change.

First the assumption in the training is that this is a false rumour without any hint of how they evidence that.
Secondly 5000 governers have been trained without any concerns being raised.
I expect professionals to engage their brains and get out silos when doing their jobs.

In the context of the training question with multiple-choice answers of "misinformation; disinformation; conspiracy theory", there isn't a tick box for "rapists can be any colour"

Rotherham was an example of where there was a sacred caste, and people are rightly furious about it. In the context of a post-Rotherham UK, rumours of a grooming gang from a racial minority, or indeed a grooming gang from a racial majority, was a really poor choice of scenario for that question.

The correct answer to all allegations of CSA, organised or otherwise, "report onwards".

I hope that the MP would say that.

Ida B Wells wrote, "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them".

In a world where lies assail us from all around, telling someone "that's disinformation" with no further explanation isn't a credible counter to what they've seen. It's a "he said, she said" situation where two people are making unevidenced claims.

A discussion about vaccine safety could include looking at reliably-sourced death and disability rates from the illnesses that the vaccines prevent, versus death and disability rates from vaccine side-effects. It could look at the history of vaccines, starting with Jenner's smallpox vaccination. It could look at how vaccines are made. It could look at Andrew Wakefield's fall from grace and introduce the term "grifter" into the kids' vocabulary, helping them understand how conspiracy theories start and why people double-down on them when contradicted.

In short, that discussion could reinforce the critical thinking skills that would help that child learn generally and make them more resistant to all forms of misinformation.

Fair point. If the point of the training is (as I was assuming) 'encourage scepticism', then none of the multiple choice options can be right - they're predicated on a foreknowledge of the 'true facts', and the motivations of anyone contradicting them. Hmmmm. 🤔

Right, kids. Believe nothing. Suspect everyone. Especially the creators of this training module.

I don’t disagree but just want to correct the tense.

It still IS happening.

Sadly, “was” can’t be used yet.

It wasn’t ‘an element of coverup’, it was active collusion and enabling at an institutional level, particularly where those institutions, councils etc are either run or heavily influenced by Muslims or those seeking to virtue signal away their underlying racism (the self proclaimed ‘anti racists’ seem to be pretty consistently racist in my recent observations) .

Rotherham is the tip of the iceberg - nobody is doing any racial or ethnicity ‘scapegoating’, we are asking for the perpetrators of these crimes to be treated like all other perpetrators and actually be prosecuted and not enabled.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9y0lvpyqvo?app-referrer=deep-link

Find me a reliable source for Reform or Yaxley-Lennon claiming that only Pakistani men rape, or that white men don't rape. That's a straw man argument, and you know it.

You are eliding two different things in the hope that we won't notice that you've declared a false equivalence between:

• People across the political spectrum's legitimate concerns about grooming gangs being covered up because of the race or religion of the perps.
• Your straw man fabrication that people are making the racist claim that only the men from certain races or religions rape, or are disproportionately more likely to rape.

We see the straw man and the false equivalence. Give it a rest. It's boring and predictable.

There seem to be two completely different discussions taking place on this thread.

What is being minimised here is the utter incompetence by the government services that facilitated the abuse.

You don't improve on that incompetence by training school governors to file rumours of grooming gangs under one of "misinformation; disinformation; conspiracy theory" without a fourth, correct option of "report to DSL for follow-up".

The point I just made is literally what the problem with that question is and is the reason why the DT reported on it in the first place.

"Believe nothing. Suspect everyone." is basically safeguarding 101 and critical thinking 101.

explains it

Sorry, but that headline is unbelievably misleading.

Yes, the question in the online training is poorly worded - and yes, there is an issue with grooming gangs which I do not dispute - but for the Telegraph to report it as governors being 'told to dismiss concerns' is just plain wrong.

Context - I've just this morning completed the online safeguarding training for two local colleges that I work in (albeit not using the same third party training tools as that being reported on). The question quoted in this article was a badly-worded hypothetical example, nothing more sinister than that.

A reminder that this training is for school governors. They hold strategic responsibilities for ensuring the school has robust policies, safer recruitment, the appropriate safeguarding appointments and structures, online safety procedures etc. That's why it matters that their training is free from political approaches / ideologies.

It's a chilling thought that some schools, sanctioned by their governors, are openly breaching their responsibilities to safeguard children by promoting mixed sex changing, social transitioning even the youngest of children etc because education failed to prioritise children's rights and needs over the demands of the adult trans lobbyists.

That's why, as this discussion shows, safeguarding should be child centred, not political ideology centred.

But that matters. Safeguarding children must be free from political ideologies and this issue has been so extensively publicly debated that the writers of the package MUST have known they were "taking a side"

Governors get one safeguarding training session a year and it matters that it's ethical and accurate. Training providers are paid a lot of £££ to get this right and "badly worded hypothetical examples" are unacceptable.

What happened in Rotherham and a number of other locations was horrific, and it is utterly shameful that the authorities turned a blind eye towards it for fear of being accused of racism. We have to face up to the fact that this happened. And indeed, may still be happening in some cases.

But let's not kid ourselves that Pakistani men are the only ones who collaborate to abuse and exploit vulnerable women and girls, and let's not pretend that we don't turn a blind eye to white men engaging in that kind of behaviour either. The Epstein scandal is a good example of this, but it isn't the only one. Where is the scrutiny and accountability for those men who took advantage of the young girls that were trafficked by Epstein? A bit of public humiliation for a couple of them, perhaps, but no real consequences under the law.

We need to create a society in which nobody is untouchable, and in which girls and women can be adequately protected from harm. That absolutely means that we need to face up to the realities of where things have gone wrong, but pretending that this kind of abuse is perpetrated predominantly by one section of the community doesn't really help us to address the problem.

I do agree with you, on all of your points - it does matter.

But the headline is pure sensationalism, given the actual wording and intention of the question.

I just don't think this sort of journalism helps anything - certainly not the wider issues being discussed.

I cant help feeling that if the scenario was about members of the royal family, or powerful political leaders, no one would say the headline was sensationalism.

But let's not kid ourselves that Pakistani men are the only ones who collaborate to abuse and exploit vulnerable women and girls, and let's not pretend that we don't turn a blind eye to white men engaging in that kind of behaviour either. The Epstein scandal is a good example of this, but it isn't the only one. Where is the scrutiny and accountability for those men who took advantage of the young girls that were trafficked by Epstein? A bit of public humiliation for a couple of them, perhaps, but no real consequences under the law.

good job that no one has done that then isn't it!

If you could please direct me to the threads where there are people trying to deflect from the rapes if Epstein et al, I’d be happy to scrutinise them.

Why are you whatabouting about the industrialised rape of thousands of girls?

PS

We don’t have to eradicate all rapes before we dare or are allowed to proactively dismantle the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs.

Not only that, we have to dismantle grooming gangs to eradicate rape.

It’s such a nonsense argument…

“Don’t bother trying to stop those rapes (which I feel uncomfortable talking about) unless you can stop these rapes (which I’m more than happy to talk about)”

I'm not whatabouting about anything. I just don't think it's helpful to focus on Pakistani grooming gangs to the exclusion of all others. Yes, it was dreadful that nobody did anything, but it wasn't unique. We have problems with our society turning a blind eye to abuse in general, and not only when the perpetrators happen to be Pakistani. Think of the open secret that was Jimmy Saville.

I'm not sure why you're asking about threads on MN deflecting from the rapes of Epstein and his cronies. I didn't make reference to any such threads. What I did say was that our society has allowed such behaviour to go under the radar, and even now, there seems to be very little accountability or transparency for the perpetrators.

It absolutely isn't about minimising what happened in Rotherham and elsewhere - we have to face up to the truth of what happened to those poor girls and we have to confront the difficult questions about the role which ethnicity and race may have played in those cases. These issues have been covered up for far too long, and of course, we need to understand exactly what happened and what went wrong. But at the same time, it would be stupid not to acknowledge that the failure to act in Rotherham is part of a much wider problem that we need to tackle as a society.

Shame on you.