On Friday the 27th July the RNIB posted the following statement on their website to update on their Independent Review:
Earlier this year, serious concerns were raised about our safeguarding governance at RNIB Pears Centre for Specialist Learning.
In April, we announced that we would be launching an Independent Review to get to the bottom of what went wrong. This Review will help us learn from our mistakes and make any necessary improvements across all of our regulated care and education services to help ensure this doesn’t happen again.
We’ve now appointed Hugh Davies QC to lead this Independent Review. We have defined the full scope and approach of the Review and this has been approved by the Charity Commission. Hugh Davies will be supported by two safeguarding experts, Alan Critchley and Margaret Hobson. The team is being overseen by the Charity Commission and our Review forms part of the Charity Commission’s statutory inquiry.
The Independent Review team have our full support and cooperation in their efforts to establish what went wrong and how we can do better in the future. It’s a complex piece of work but the team expect to report their findings to the Charity Commission within the next few months.
We are fully committed to implementing the Review’s recommendations and to improving our safeguarding governance.
The wellbeing of the people we support is our main priority and we continue to work with Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to improve the quality of our service at RNIB Pears Centre and across all of our other services.