66 Problems but a Fix Ain’t One

The independent audit conducted by the INEQE Safeguarding Group into the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team has produced 66 recommendations for reform, restructuring, and expansion.

Sixty-six.

The Church will undoubtedly describe the INEQE audit as “progress.” And technically, perhaps it is.

But when a safeguarding system requires 66 recommendations for reform, restructuring, and expansion, the public is entitled to ask whether this reflects progress or reveals how dysfunctional the system had already become before meaningful scrutiny became unavoidable.

At what point does an “improvement plan” stop looking like progress and start looking like an admission that the system itself has been profoundly dysfunctional for years?

Healthy safeguarding cultures do not usually require a document long enough to resemble a small Levitical code simply to explain what competent safeguarding should look like.

For years, survivors, clergy, whistleblowers, and safeguarding professionals have raised the same concerns around institutional defensiveness, opaque decision-making, inconsistent practice, excessive workloads, poor communication, and a culture where protecting the Church’s reputation too often appears dangerously entangled with protecting vulnerable people.

And still the institution responds with another audit, another restructuring exercise, another promise that lessons have now finally been learned. Apparently this time for real.

Let’s break it down: more staffing will not fix a culture that resists scrutiny. More governance structures will not fix an institution committed to self-protection. More recommendations will not restore trust that has already been squandered. Systems fail when accountability becomes performative, when transparency is feared, and when institutional preservation takes priority over truth. Until that culture changes, every new initiative risks becoming another layer of management wrapped around the same unresolved problem.

The Church of England’s safeguarding crisis is no longer simply about safeguarding.

It is about credibility. An institution that repeatedly announces its commitment to learning while repeatedly presiding over failure eventually loses the moral authority to reassure anyone that meaningful change is coming.

Survivors are asked to trust processes that have historically exhausted, sidelined, or retraumatised them. Safeguarding professionals are expected to absorb impossible workloads inside systems that often appear more concerned with liability than accountability. Whistleblowers are publicly thanked for their courage and privately treated as organisational irritants (You’re welcome).

And every new review is unveiled with the tone of a breakthrough discovery, as though the core problems have only just been identified. But the problems have been identified for years. And that raises an even more uncomfortable question: How did we get here in the first place?

Organisations do not become this dysfunctional overnight. Cultures like this are built slowly through defensiveness, avoidance, deference to power, fear of scandal, and an institutional instinct to protect reputation before people.

Over time, criticism becomes disloyalty. Survivors become problems to manage. Whistleblowers become threats to contain. Safeguarding becomes conflated with optics and image control.

That is how institutions end up needing 66 recommendations simply to explain how safeguarding should function.

Not because nobody knew. But because too many people knew for too long while the institution proved unwilling, or unable, to confront itself honestly.

Because 66 recommendations do not inspire confidence.

They raise a far more uncomfortable question:

How catastrophically dysfunctional does a safeguarding system need to become before this stops being called “reform” and starts being called what it actually is?

You can read the full report here.

~ Michelle Burns

Guarding the Flock

Writing this blog takes time, care, and a lot of tea. If it’s been helpful to you, you’re very welcome to buy me a cuppa as a small way of supporting it. No pressure at all – I’m just glad you’re here - Michelle