Thread by @MankamalSingh

SIKH COMMUNITY ATTITUDE TO SAFEGUARDING!
This article is not a pleasant article to share. It brings Sikh faith schools into disrepute, but it's a reality and public outcome of a drawn out legal challenge hopefully opening the eyes of wider Sikh community.

https://twitter.com/SchoolsWeek/status/1446749277133459458?t=7lh4MCZceNwHTUbNoSp6Fw&s=19

The reported Khalsa Academies Trust scandal demonstrates complacency/breach in following statutory safeguarding procedures & subsequent covering up. It resulted in unnecessary clashes with educationalists, local authorities, Ofsted, governors, parents, @educationgovuk etc.

The cover up attempt created such a big fallout, severely damaging staff careers, ruining kids education, undue stress on parents, gaslighting of governors (such as myself) and trustees for raising concerns.

On a personal level, some of us were labelled "grasses" by the local Gurdwara committee. We were labelled "extremists", "fundamentalists" and part of a "sect" by this Trust and even subject to a Counter Extremism investigation. We were labelled troublemakers and malicious.

We were ghosted, demonised and gaslighted by some in our own community. We endured viral videos, radio shows attempting to distort and misportray us.

All we we did was raise genuine school safeguarding concerns as per our statutory school governor duties.

But the ignorance of our own community fostered the culture of cover up and complicity. So ask yourself, how easily will other people come out to highlight safeguarding concerns in Sikh spaces when they will be treated this way.

With all the recent lively discussion around lack of safeguarding in Sikh spaces, the community must also understand how systemic the cover up culture is and how it even seeps into UK Sikh faith schools, despite the illusion of process and procedures.

The whole safeguarding discussion is "philosophically flawed" in Sikh institutes from Gurdwaras to camps to schools until the cover up culture is eradicated and safeguarding is taken seriously!

The matter of certain Sikh bodies and their complicity to cover up for a Trust that they are allied with should be an even bigger concern and needs addressing.

I hope there is light at the end of the tunnel for Sikh schools who suffer from poor leadership. More than anything I hope the failure of Sikhs schools is not a conversation we have in retrospect in the coming decades.

Let's see what the future has in store. 🙏🏽