Recent work

Keith Cooper is a freelance journalist, writer, and researcher

SEND pupils ‘injured by staff’ at UK school owned by Abu Dhabi royal family

Vulnerable children have been left with “terrible” injuries and trauma because of their treatment by staff at a taxpayer-funded private special school, The i Paper has been told.

Pupils claim they watched frightened classmates scream in pain as they were pinned down at Bramley Hill School, Surrey, which charges the state annual fees of between £96,814 to £107,531 per child. All gave their accounts with parental permission.

Their parents are calling on the Government to intervene and stop the “horror show” at the school run by Witherslack Group – one of the UK’s biggest operators of private SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) provision, which is ultimately owned by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.

Revealed: Housing crisis quango Homes England spent £117m on failed IT project

Angela Rayner’s ministry has had to step in over “wasteful spending” at Homes England after the government housing agency burned through more than £117m on a failed IT project, The i Paper can reveal. 

Labour is relying on the organisation to deliver large parts of its ambitious plan to build 1.5m new homes by 2029, but developers are concerned about the way it has performed.

The taxpayer money Homes England spent on Evolve – an aborted scheme to modernise its error-prone computer systems – could have been enough to pay for as many as 3,360 brand new affordable homes.

More than half of teachers using physical restraint on children have had no training on how do so safely in the last two years, and more than a quarter have had none at all, new polling for The i Paper reveals.

More than half of teachers using physical restraint on children have had no training on how do so safely in the last two years, and more than a quarter have had none at all, new polling for The i Paper reveals.

The findings from a survey of more than 7,000 teachers come as disquiet grows about the extent of such physical interventions in both special and mainstream schools and the traumatic impact it can have on pupils.

Thousands of unused affordable homes sitting empty in new housing ‘scandal’

Thousands of brand new affordable homes are sitting empty and unused because of a “colossal” hidden national housing crisis, i can reveal.

Homes earmarked for homeless families in London, the South West, the East of England, and the Midlands, are among the many that have been built – but never occupied.

Some have been left empty for up to three years, developers have told i, because the housing associations that would previously have bought and managed the homes can no longer afford to. Developers says the associations have effectively “shut up shop”.

Invisible children: how poor conditions in temporary accommodation are damaging young lives

When thousands of children start school next month, an alarming number of them will arrive dirty, tired and underdeveloped, far from ready for that vital first year. These children will all have one thing in common: they will have spent their early years in temporary accommodation, arranged by a local authority’s homelessness department.

Some will have grown up confined to a small room, shared with the rest of their family, with no space to play, walk or socialise with other children.

Others might live in mixed housing blocks alongside drug users, where their older siblings prefer to use a potty in the cupboard rather than queue in the corridor for a shared toilet.

Deadly delays

Kierran Fletcher, a father and professional Thai kickboxer in his 20s, had been waiting, bags packed, for 24 hours for a hospital bed when he rushed out of his home and killed Nigel Abbott in a frenzied assault, believing him to be the devil.

Mr Fletcher’s first episode of psychosis had been diagnosed quickly by his GP the previous afternoon. Hours later, an urgent admission had been advised by a psychiatrist. After considerable effort, his family had persuaded him to be treated.

But there were no beds free in BSMHFT (Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust) that night.

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At What Price? An in-depth examination of the evidence for ‘organ harvesting’ in China.

It sounds like science fiction or an echo of a past horror. People rounded up into prison camps, their healthy organs removed without proper consent by unscrupulous surgeons for transplantation, all under a veil of state secrecy.

Yet, this isn’t fiction, according to many doctors, scholars, and campaigners. They say it’s been routine practice in China for decades and still is, a claim its government denies and the CMA (Chinese Medical Association) calls ‘groundless’.

So, what is fact and fiction in this alleged atrocity?

Banned from getting better – the impact of outmoded hospitals on mental health care

The front desk that greets you at Lynfield Mount Hospital, Bradford, is encased in glass, the friendly receptionists peering out from inside.

Wards are reached through four locked doors, along characterless halls in institutional magnolia. You buzz in, you buzz out.

You’re left in no doubt about where you’re heading.

A Place of Refuge – a report on the squalid refugee camps on Europe’s borders

They call them ‘soft signs’ in the paediatric clinic outside Moria, a refugee camp. Bed-wetting is one. ‘We see it a lot,’ says the Italian consultant paediatrician Carola Buscemi who helps run the clinic on Lesvos, Greece, for medical charity MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières).

Then there are the children who have panic attacks in the clinic, as young as six or seven, at least once a week. The babies who stop growing, under the conditions of the camp.

‘This is not normal,’ says Dr Buscemi. ‘These people are completely collapsing.’

Born of injustice – an investigation into the removal of a child from a mother with mental ill health.

Carrie Adams,* a junior doctor and mother of two, is back in family court. The same one which ordered her first child, Evie,* to be removed, a day after she was born. She’s to face the same judge, who agreed after nine months for her daughter to go home.

But Dr Adams is here today, years later, under very different circumstances.

*names have been changed

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