Teacher Who Tried To Raise The Alarm About Southport Killer Was Accused Of ‘Racially Profiling’ The Teenager
A headteacher who tried to raise the alarm about Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was accused by mental health workers of racially profiling ‘a black boy with a knife.’
Rudakubana was enrolled at The Acorns School, in Ormskirk, Lancashire, aged 13, after being expelled from mainstream education for taking a knife into class.
Headteacher Joanne Hodson told the public inquiry investigating his crimes that, from his first day at school, she realised the teenager was ‘very high risk’.
She e-mailed staff at the school to say Rudakubana needed to be regularly searched for knives because he hadn’t displayed any emotion or ‘remorse’ and was ‘very high risk’.
However, Hodson was later advised to remove the word ‘sinister’ and comments referring to Rudakubana as ‘cold and calculating’ from an education plan after mental health workers accused her of racially profiling him.
Hodson claims she agreed to remove the words after the accusation of racial profiling ‘closed her down professionally’.
Hodson described her first meeting with Rudakuaba, when she asked the teenager why he had taken a knife into his previous school.
She recalled: ‘He looked me in the eyes and said “to use it”. This is the only time in my career that a pupil has said this to me or behaved in a manner so devoid of any remorse.’
Is it any wonder why she then chose to describe the boy as ‘sinister’ and mark him as ‘high-risk’? Incredibly, mental health workers were more concerned that she may have been racially profiling a pupil who would bring knives into school with the intention of using them, which as we all know, he eventually did.
Hodson added that said she was surprised that Rudakubana’s parents, who were also at the meeting, ‘didn’t flinch’ at his comment.
According to Hodson: ‘They believed their son was a good boy whose bad behaviour was a consequence of him being previously bullied and his actions were someone else’s fault.’
Hodson was so worried that she sent an e-mail to her staff saying: ‘AR (Rudakubana) was a highly unusual pupil, the most unusual I had experienced during my career.
‘At Acorns, we educate and support young people with a range of complex needs, however, I’ve never come across a pupil like AR. He was incredibly difficult to read and had an unusual energy and was unpredictable.
‘There was a sinister undertone, and it was difficult to build rapport. He had no respect for authority and generally a lack of respect of other pupils and staff. He was insistent that his views alone were correct and everyone else was wrong.
‘There was never any sense of remorse or accountability for his actions. Those features are, in my view, extraordinary.’
Aside from that one comment, Rudakubana would look up school shootings online, make disturbing statements and threaten pupils and staff.
Hodson was worried he would bring a knife into The Acorns School and attack someone, but instead he travelled to his former school in Formby, on December 5, 2019, and attacked a pupil there with a hockey stick. He was also found with a knife in his bag.
By then The Acorns School had already referred Rudakubana to the Government’s counter-terror programme, Prevent. Unfortunately, MI5 did not believe he met the threshold for opening a Security Service investigation because no terrorist or domestic extremist ideology was identified.
A second Prevent referral was made by the school a year later in 2021 over posts Rudakubana made about Colonel Gaddafi on Instagram.
Finally, a third referral was made a few weeks later, after Rudakubana had webpages open about the London Bridge attack in class. He was also discussing the IRA, MI5, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Each time, his case wasn’t considered serious enough and the case was closed.
Rudakubana was not allowed to return to The Acorns School because of the attack at his former school, and he had not been to school in over two years when he killed Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, and attempted to murder 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last year.
It’s absolutely shocking to know that the headteacher at The Acorns School, Joanne Hodson, could see a tragedy coming from miles away, but was dismissed not only by mental health workers but also by MI5. From the sounds of it, he was quite blatantly a cold-blooded killer in the making, even if no one could have predicted quite how evil and sadistic his crimes would have turned out to be.
What else can you say really? Here’s hoping lessons have been learned and that the other young men and women like Rudakubana are properly assessed based solely on their behaviours, and not their backgrounds or colour of their skin.
The inquiry also found that Rudakubana’s taxi driver sped away from the massacre and took another fare before calling 999. Shameful.
