As a parent, you trust your government not to lie to you when it tells you that your children are safe. When you see Ofsted, the English education watchdog, has inspected a school, you trust that the grading awarded reflects the reality of school life.
But the government is lying to the parents of children at the Army Foundation College in Harrogate, the UK Armed Forces’ main training establishment for 16- and 17-year-olds.
An average of 2,380 children have trained at AFC Harrogate each year for the past five years. Its brochure tells would-be recruits and their parents of “world-class” opportunities, “lifelong friendships” and “unforgettable memories” and boasts that Ofsted has repeatedly awarded the college an ‘Outstanding’ grade for welfare and duty of care since 2012.
This grade is a lie. AFC Harrogate isn’t a college; it’s a military training establishment. The children at AFC aren’t students, they’re ‘junior soldiers’. This means that AFC is excluded from all the educational standards a civilian college is held to. Attendees cannot leave at will; they are subject to military law while training, and they can even be imprisoned if they leave without permission. Ofsted’s ‘Outstanding’ rating does not cover the quality of the education at all.
Worst of all, the watchdog’s rating ignores a long history of documented abuse.
While investigating what complaints have been made at AFC Harrogate, as part of my work for the Child Rights International Network (CRIN), we obtained the inspectors’ notes from the last Ofsted visit to the site in March 2024. Recorded under a section entitled ‘Ill treatment of recruits by staff’ was the following:
- In 2021: 8 allegations made, 6 substantiated and military action taken;
- In 2022: 10 allegations, 5 substantiated and action taken;
- In 2023: 6 allegations, 2 substantiated and actioned;
- In 2024: The data was greyed out.
None of this was featured in Ofsted’s subsequent report, in which it gave the institution glowing praise.
When we asked Ofsted why it had failed to include the allegations of abuse in its report, especially given it was told about these complaints during inspection, it said that its inspectors check whether “any serious complaints raised” have been “appropriately investigated” by the proper authorities.
The watchdog followed up by saying that it “can only report on what we find during our inspections”. So, unless Ofsted inspectors physically see child abuse happening, it doesn't exist.
Over the past decade, CRIN has heard from a 16-year-old former recruit who witnessed his friend being so badly beaten by an instructor at AFC Harrogate that they broke his leg; he was then forced to march on it for miles until the leg turned black. We’ve spoken with a Black female instructor who faced systemic racist and misogynistic abuse, who was ignored when she tried to report allegations of child abuse, including a Black recruit being “forced by his then section commander to eat dog food and walked on a leash”. We know of a 16-year-old boy who was so badly bullied that he attempted to take his own life.
A British Army source was asked about one teenage recruit’s suicide attempt by The Times in November last year. They simply said: “Unfortunately, bad things can happen at any school or youth organisation. It’s inexcusable, but it’s certainly not unique to [AFC Harrogate]”.
You might ask how you would feel about that as a defence if it were made about any other school in the country.
These instances of abuse are just the tip of the iceberg. A new investigation by openDemocracy and CRIN has uncovered more than 473 allegations of physical violence against 16 and 17-year-olds since 2018. These include 41 complaints of violence against children by staff – of bathroom beatings, waterboardings, sexual assaults and rapes.
Compared to adult female soldiers, girls under the age of 18 face a tenfold increased risk of sexual abuse in the armed forces, according to a response to a parliamentary question that has since been deleted from the House of Commons’ website. It is not known whether boys of the same age face a similarly heightened risk, as the Ministry of Defence has repeatedly refused to answer questions about which military bases have the worst record of sexual violence. Five AFC Harrogate instructors have been jailed for physical or sexual abuse in four years, though the genders of their victims are mostly unknown.
The official army recruiters’ handbook, which CRIN obtained through Freedom of Information laws, states that recruits under the age of 18 “present an opportunity to mitigate shortfalls in Standard Entry (adult) recruitment, particularly for the infantry”. To translate, children are being pushed into the army because it can't convince enough adults to join. The army wants children – particularly young working-class boys – to train for its most dangerous roles, while it fails to protect them from abuse by its own members of staff.
This isn’t just about a misleading Ofsted report; it’s about the very nature of an institution. Given its record, I am dubious of the British Army’s ability to change and ensure the protection of the children under its care.
The simplest way to end the abuse would be for the army to transition to an all-adult recruitment, like most of the rest of the world. This would not only end the abuse of children, it would also save tens of millions of pounds a year in training costs, with CRIN finding that training a 16-year-old soldier costs, on average, £100,000 more than training an adult to the same standard.
In the absence of such a commitment, the British Army will need to begin the long, hard road to reform, to ensure it is fit for the ambitions of the under-18s who sign up.
The Army Foundation College is the most dangerous “school” in the country. The recruits who attend and their families deserve so much more than the lies and cover-ups they’re being served.
If you or someone you know has attended the Army Foundation College, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us via info@crin.org
