What happened
Clare Lodge, near Peterborough, is a secure children’s home run by Peterborough City Council and approved by the Secretary of State to restrict children’s liberty. It cares for up to 16 girls aged 10 to 17, placed by local authorities under section 25 of the Children Act 1989.
Nine children were living there when Ofsted carried out an assurance inspection on 4 November 2025.
Inspectors found children were sometimes restrained for compliance rather than safety, and that staff used holds outside agreed practice. Staff used unapproved techniques to remove a child from another child’s bedroom. They also physically intervened to try to retrieve a radio concealed under a child’s jumper.
Ofsted concluded: “Neither of these incidents met the threshold for the use of physical intervention, and such actions are therefore unlawful practice.”
On one occasion an agency worker pulled and dragged a child and threw items at them repeatedly, and permanent staff did not intervene.
The outcome
Ofsted identified “serious and widespread concerns” about the care and protection of children, and set statutory requirements with a deadline of 15 December 2025. They cover the quality and purpose of care, protection of children, leadership and management, restraint, care planning, staff recruitment, and the notification of serious incidents.
No prosecution is recorded. The home had been judged requires improvement at its full inspection on 7 May 2025, with no enforcement action since.
What went wrong
Three failures compound each other in this report.
Children were not consistently seen by a health professional after restraint, even when they said they had been hurt, so an injury reported during a restraint went unexamined.
Leaders and managers were unaware of some significant incidents, and their documented reviews did not always match the CCTV.
And the manager had not consistently notified Ofsted of serious incidents, so the regulator heard about some of this late.
Ofsted recorded that the abuse, and permanent staff’s failure to stop it, “represents a serious safeguarding failure and contributes to an unsafe and harmful culture in the home”.
What it teaches
The threshold test is the training point, and this case is clear about it. Two of the unlawful interventions were small: moving a child out of another child’s room, and getting a radio back from under a jumper. Neither met the legal criteria for physical intervention at all, and in both staff reached for hands where the outcome they wanted looked reasonable.
The law does not ask whether your objective was sensible. It asks whether the force was necessary and proportionate to a risk of harm, and a radio is not a risk of harm.
The other lesson is that the health check after restraint is part of the restraint. A child who says the hold hurt them and is not examined has been failed twice.
Questions for the room
- A radio is under a child’s jumper. What are your options before your hands, and why does the law care which you choose?
- A child says the restraint hurt. What has to happen in the next hour, and who checks that it did?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Ofsted’s assurance inspection report was opened and read, and its findings are quoted directly.
The only press source held, a republication of local reporting, failed to fetch, so the account rests on the inspection report alone. The report as fetched stops partway through the notification requirement, so the list of requirements above may not be complete.
The inspection was on 4 November 2025 and the report was published in 2026. The record follows the inspection date. No child or member of staff is named; nobody has been convicted.
Our restraint reduction training covers positional risk, duration limits and the monitoring that has to go with any hold.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.