Dilworth School, reeling from the fallout of staff convicted of child sex offences and a societal reckoning over historical abuse, has set aside $43.7 million for redress to people believed to have suffered serious physical and sexual harm during their time as students.
Dilworth is a private boys’ boarding school established in 1906 with a property bequest that included hundreds of acres of what would later become present-day Epsom and Remuera.
The school leveraged that real estate to build a $1.2 billion property empire and provide full-ride scholarships for primary and secondary students and become New Zealand’s best-resourced private school.
Accounts for Dilworth filed with the Charities Register show the school’s trust board set aside $350,000 in the 2021 financial year, and $43.154m in 2022, to provide redress for an estimated 250 students who suffered sexual or physical abuse since the 1950s. Payments are to be individually capped at $300,000 for “the most exceptional cases”.
While the Dilworth redress scheme is believed to be the largest non-government compensation package set aside for child abuse in New Zealand’s history, it has been called insufficient by some former students who suffered there.
The programme is also being closely watched by other private schools, churches and government agencies who - based on hearings by the Abuse in Care Royal Commission - are grappling with similar historic issues but a significantly larger scales.
An audit note from KPMG said Dilworth’s $44m provision was subject to change: “The magnitude of claims, potential uncertainties and outcomes cannot presently be determined and, accordingly, the trust consider the provision to be the best estimate at a specific point in time and caution readers of the financial statements that the final amounts incurred will differ, potentially, from the estimates provided.”
A Herald request to interview Dilworth chairman Aaron Snodgrass about the historic compensation package was declined by school public relations staff, who said the programme was being run independently of the board.
“Out of respect for the independence of the Dilworth Redress Programme, Mr Snodgrass will not be available for interviews on this topic,” they said.
In written answers to questions, Snodgrass said the programme hoped to make its first payments to former students in the first quarter of 2024. “The Panel operates entirely independently of Dilworth School and the Board and we must respect its process,” Snodgrass said.
Alarming evidence of child abuse at Dilworth began to emerge in the 1990s with the conviction of school chaplain Peter Taylor for sexual abuse. This turned into a horrific geyser after New Zealand Police launched Operation Beverly in 2019, which has so far seen charges and convictions entered against nearly a dozen former staff.
In response, the school set up its redress programme and also appointed former judge Dame Silvia Cartwright and Frances Joychild KC to conduct an inquiry into abuse at Dilworth.
The Cartwright and Joychild report, published in September, chronicled decades of institutionalised abuse and a culture that enabled and covered up offending.
The report concluded at least 233 students had been victimised - around 5 per cent of the 4693 students who attended between 1950-2023 - and noted a couple of dozen old boys went on to commit suicide.
Regarding the conviction of Taylor in 1994, the report said the school provided “limited assistance” to police investigating the case and “the only focus for the Board was to ensure it obtained name suppression of their staff member of school”.
The report detailed how staff subject to complaints of abuse were allowed to quietly resign, and the board had overly focused on managing the commercial aspects of its property business instead of providing adequate care for its students.
Dilworth survivor Neil Harding, who gave evidence during the Operation Beverly trials and leads a class action by former students against Dilworth, said the road to redress had been long.
“They’re only doing it because they’ve been backed into a corner. It’s only because a bunch of lawyers forced them to do it. They’ve been sitting on this information for decades. And don’t for one minute believe Dilworth has done anything proactively,” he said.
Harding said while $44m sounded like a lot of money, it represented only a fraction of the trust’s billion-dollar asset base.
“For them to nominate an amount of money - almost paying it out of petty cash - when they have the ability to pay a lot more, but they don’t want to and don’t have to, it’s so arbitrary,” he said.
Amanda Hill, who has made numerous submissions to the Royal Commission and is on a panel of lawyers retained to assist Dilworth in providing redress to claimants, said the programme was largely spurred by legal action from former students.
But the compensation package was considerably more generous than that offered to date by government agencies managing similar fallout, she said.
“Dilworth is a really wealthy school, and it really puts the state claims process to shame.
“I’ve given grudging credit to Dilworth for leading the way. Everyone else will have to follow.”
Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism - including twice being named Reporter of the Year - and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.
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