The morning of 9 May 2022 had started like any other for Katie Wheeler, by dropping off her nine-month-old daughter Genevieve at the Tiny Toes nursery in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, and telling her: “I love you sweetie.”
She thought she was leaving her in a safe place, but just hours later, Genevieve, known as Gigi to her loved ones, was found unresponsive. Nursery worker Kate Roughley had swaddled Gigi so tightly that she had been unable to move, and had placed her face down on a bean bag, leaving her to suffocate over a period of 90 minutes.
Distressing audio footage later played in court showed Roughley telling Gigi to “stop crying” and pulling a blanket over her head. At one point, she told a colleague, “if you keep yourself busy, you can’t hear her [Genevieve] crying”.
She was later jailed for 14 years after being convicted of manslaughter. For Ms Wheeler and her partner, John Meehan, their grief at losing their giggly and mischievous daughter quickly turned to horror as they realised how little regulation was in place for nurseries, with many operating without CCTV and without any guidelines on safe sleep practices.
Figures obtained by the BBC last year showed that there were almost 20,000 reports of serious childcare incidents in England’s nurseries between 2019 and 2024.
It is not only Gigi’s death that has brought the issue of early years safeguarding into the headlines – on Monday, Nathan Bennett was found guilty of sexually abusing five boys aged between two and three at nursery in Bristol.
And on Thursday, prolific sex offender Vincent Chan is due to be jailed for molesting girls aged three and four while working at the Bright Horizons nursery in West Hampstead, with 46 families affected by his abuse. This included abusing children during naptime, downloading thousands of indecent images of children and filming toddlers in distress.
“You assume it’s a heavily regulated industry with all the safety measures in place. I worried about choking incidents, but never did I think Gigi was at risk of being harmed. You take it for granted. You think that your child is going to be safe,” Ms Wheeler said.
“Me and John had conversations when she started and I said ‘what if they’re not nice to her’, and he said ‘of course they’ll be nice to her’. You think you’re being ridiculous. To find out everything we did during the trial was unbelievably horrifying and so shocking.”
While Gigi’s nursery had CCTV, the couple had been “shocked” to later discover conditions inside the nursery, including occasions where 16 children had been placed in the care of just one staff member, in breach of safeguarding rules, they were unaware that recent complaints had been made about the nursery, and they were unaware that inspections by the regulator Ofsted were only undertaken every few years.
They are now calling for compulsory CCTV, for unannounced inspections to be carried out by Ofsted and for mandatory training and statutory safe sleep guidance to be given to all nursery staff.
“We didn’t know Gigi had fought for her life, and it took 90 mins for her to die, you cannot fathom it,” Ms Wheeler said. “How that can possibly happen in this country I will never understand. When that happened to Gigi, why wasn’t action taken? How is the death of a child not enough?”
Following Chan’s guilty pleas, a local child safeguarding practice review was commissioned in December by education secretary Bridget Phillipson to “learn every lesson”, while education minister Olivia Bailey told the Commons that the government is “considering the mandatory use of CCTV in early years settings”.
During Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Liberal Democrat MP Munira Wilson joined the calls for CCTV and a childcare register, with Sir Keir Starmer stating: “These are harrowing cases for everyone in the country. The safety of children is, of course, paramount, and we are acting to keep them safe. We are implementing all the proposals consulted on to strengthen safeguarding as part of our Early Years Foundation Framework.”
He added that they were considering the introduction of mandatory CCTV within this framework.
Ms Wheeler said she will continue her fight to ensure no other child experiences what hers did.
She told The Independent: “I cannot tell you the pride I have in being Gigi’s mum. I know she is a very kind little girl and if she had the chance to grow up and be in this world, she would want to protect others. I never wanted it to be my child, but never would I ever want it to be someone else’s child either.
“I have felt so much positivity since starting this campaign. I feel like I’m doing something for her and telling her story. That means more to me than I could possibly put into words.”
Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, said CCTV was an important step to mitigate against the “safeguarding crisis in our nurseries”.
She said: “There were almost 20,000 reports of serious childcare incidents in English nurseries in the five years to March 2024 – up 40 per cent on the previous five years. Meanwhile, the number of legal claims involving injuries to children in nurseries has increased tenfold over the past decade.
“I’m not naïve to the scale of these challenges, and I don’t think CCTV is a silver bullet to solve all violence and assault towards children, but it’s an important step towards safeguarding the most vulnerable people in our society, and one I believe a Government with Labour values should be prioritising.”
