Coroners, courts, regulators and inspectors have recorded what restraint does to the people it is used on. This casebook publishes those records as short, sourced case pages: what happened, what went wrong, and what it means for the people running the service.
Every entry states its confidence, what could not be verified, and where the source runs out. Where a case is still live, we hold it. Where a name cannot be justified, we do not print it. Publications are labelled as publications, because a national count is not an incident.
22 case entries and 8 publications.
A radio under a jumper, and hands instead of words
Ofsted found restraint used for compliance at a secure children's home, including holds applied to move a child out of a room and to retrieve a concealed radio.
PublicationSame law, same definitions, a seventeen-fold difference in restraint
Scotland counted 6,263 incidents of physical restraint across children's residential services in 2024. The rate per place, not the total, is the number that teaches.
A child said they could not breathe, and nobody asked why
An Ofsted inspection found a child held on the floor saying they could not breathe, and a registered manager who did not question it.
A boy was held in a padded room whose door staff held shut from outside
A court found a residential special school was secluding a severely autistic pupil and using transport holds without a legal footing, and set conditions for both.