Key Facts

• A former employee at Partou King Street Nursery in Bristol, Bessie Martin, claims she alerted management to Nathan Bennett's behavior, including him holding children for too long and sitting them on his lap out of view of CCTV, but her concerns were dismissed and she was told she was "imagining it".
• Nathan Bennett was sentenced to 30 years in prison in February for sexually abusing five boys aged two and three, and had previously been allowed to return to work at the nursery after being suspended, despite concerns about his behavior.
• The BBC investigation found that Partou nurseries were twice as likely to get a Welfare Requirements Notice (WRN) from Ofsted than the average nursery in the four years to March 2025, and more than seven times more likely in the following 12 months after Bennett's arrest.
• Another nursery chain, Bright Horizons, which runs 270 UK nurseries, also received a higher than average number of WRNs from Ofsted after the arrest of paedophile Vincent Chan, who was jailed for 18 years in February for abusing children at a Bright Horizons nursery in West Hampstead.
• The Department for Education has announced that there will be 3,000 more unannounced nursery inspections each year in England from the autumn, triple the number compared to the year to April 2025, in an effort to improve safeguarding standards.