One of the Lads: Auditing the Boys in Church of England Safeguarding

Institutions don’t reveal themselves in their policies. They reveal themselves in rooms where they think nobody is watching.

That truth dawned on me at a Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers’ Day held at The Oval Cricket Ground in late 2023; a stunning venue chosen not for practicality, but for symbolism.

All of the Church of England’s Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers were gathered in polished corporate hospitality suites: immaculate staging, expensive food, every detail engineered to project gravity, reform, and control.

It looked like safeguarding mattered.

It was designed to look like it mattered.

By then, we had all been sold the promise of a new era of “Ofsted-style” audits when the Archbishops’ Council handed a five-year contract to the INEQE Safeguarding Group to audit every diocese, every cathedral, and even the National Safeguarding Team itself.

Now, I’ve worked in Local Authorities when Ofsted arrives. Files are torn apart, decisions are questioned, and leaders are held to account. Practice is dismantled line by line; it’s relentless and uncomfortable. And so it should be. Real lives are not a branding exercise.

I can’t speak for every safeguarding adviser within the Church of England. What I can say is this: when I first heard about the INEQE audits, I was nervous. There was a quiet but tangible anxiety among colleagues, not because we feared exposure, but because some of us understood what real inspection looks like. We had lived through it. We understood the weight of genuine accountability.

What unfolded at The Oval was not that.

The Head of the National Safeguarding Team introduced the Director of INEQE. From the first slide, the tone was clear. This wasn’t about challenging power. It was about tranquillising it.

We were offered corporate reassurance: “outcome-based frameworks,” “supportive challenge,” “learning cultures.” What we were not offered was clarity about consequences. Nothing that actually forced change. No explanation of what would happen when serious safeguarding failures were uncovered. No evidence that anyone powerful would be forced into discomfort. It wasn’t scrutiny. It was cushioning.

Then came the Q&A, and whatever illusion remained collapsed. Several former police officers in the room, now Diocesan Safeguarding Advisers, clearly knew the Director from earlier careers. The tone shifted from professional to matey, and the room warmed. Jokes landed. One DSA grabbed the microphone to comment on the Director’s weight since they’d last worked together.

Laughter everywhere.

This was meant to be independence.

The reckoning.

The clean break with systemic failure.

On paper, it was accountability.

In the room, it was a pantomime.

It felt like lads catching up over pints.

In that moment, the façade of independence fell away.

You could feel it in the room. You could see shoulders dropping and defences lowering. The auditor was not an external challenger arriving to unsettle the system. This certainly didn’t feel like an external body holding the Church to account. This felt like one of the lads. One of the boys, part of the same professional tribe. An ex-copper among ex-coppers, embedded in a culture that prizes camaraderie, banter, and loyalty above confrontation.

There was an unspoken understanding in that room that this was safe territory. Not through conspiracy, but through familiarity. Through shared identity. Through the quiet certainty that nobody was there to truly detonate anything.

This is regulatory capture in its purest and simplest form. It doesn’t arrive looking crooked. It arrives looking comfortable. It smiles, shakes hands, calls itself professional. But it quietly strangles real safeguarding before challenge ever has a chance to breathe.

When oversight is delivered by someone culturally aligned with those being overseen, accountability rarely bites — it bends. Not through conspiracy or malice, but through comfort and recognition. Through the human instinct to go easier on those we know, or believe we know.

Safeguarding audits are meant to answer one uncompromising question: Are children and vulnerable adults actually safe?

But when that question passes through boys’ club culture, entrenched loyalties, and contracts measured in millions, the conclusion is often shaped long before the first interview begins.

Failure is laundered into learning points.

Harm diluted into development areas.

Abuse buried beneath “lessons learned.”

Language becomes the solvent that dissolves accountability.

The Church has repeatedly prioritised visible reform: new structures, new boards, new terminology. Yet culture remains more durable than policy. Without structural, cultural, and psychological independence, oversight drifts from transformative to performative.

Structures can be rearranged endlessly. Culture will consume reform. Every. Single. Time.

The surroundings that day were flawless. The slides immaculate. The language perfect. Yet beneath the polish sat the reality: fur coat, no knickers — and everyone in that room understood exactly where their bread was buttered.

Independence was packaged and presented. Containment would be the operational outcome. These audits were never built to confront power, only to pacify it.

That day, overlooking the lush green of the Oval Cricket Ground, was not accountability taking root.

It was theatre. A spectacle carefully unveiled.

A boys’ club policing its own conduct and stage-managing consequences.

A performance of protection designed to look fierce while threatening absolutely nothing.

And the most unsettling part wasn’t surprise.

It was recognition.

The room already knew the script.

~ Michelle Burns