At some point during this investigative archive project, it occurred to me that it would be important to include all existing Merchiston Castle School inspection reports and related correspondence. These can be found in the School Inspection Reports section of the Document Library.

This collection of documents would allow us to see what kinds of bodies inspected and inspect the school, what archived historical inspection material is available from different eras, and what the inspection bodies had to say about the school during what we now know—through hindsight—were its darkest days. This was not to be a simple task.

How many historical reports exist on the Internet?

At the time this article was written—in late September 2026, after hunting for reports for two years—I have only been able to track down a total of 33 inspection reports and related official correspondence from all inspection bodies, a list which includes the school itself. These reports only go back to 2000.

The following is a dynamically-inserted list of all school inspection reports retrieved to date, so may enlarge over time:

• HMIE – Merchiston External Inspection Report (16 May 2000)*
• HMIE – Follow-up to Merchiston External Inspection (25 June 2000)*
• HMIE – Letter to Merchiston Board of Governors (25 June 2002)*
• HMIE – Press Release on Merchiston’s ‘Key Strengths’ (17 June 2003)*
• HMIE – Merchiston External Inspection Report (17 June 2003)*
• Care Commission/HMIE – Merchiston External Inspection Report (25 October 2005)
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (13 March 2007)
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (5 November 2007)*
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (5 March 2008)*
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (31 October 2008)*
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (12 March 2009)*
• Care Commission – Merchiston External Inspection Report (17 June 2010)*
• SCSWIS – Merchiston External Inspection Report (17 May 2011)*
• HMIE – Merchiston External Inspection Report (2-3 June 2011)*
• HMIE – Letter to Merchiston parents (6 September 2011)*
• Office of the Scottish Charity Register – Merchiston Report (17 November 2011)*
• SCSWIS – Merchiston External Inspection Report (13 December 2011)*
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (29 October 2012)*
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (4 September 2013)*
• Education Scotland/Care Inspectorate – Letter to Merchiston parents following October 2014 External Inspection (20 January 2015)*
• Care Inspectorate/Education Scotland – Merchiston External Inspection Report (11 May 2015)*
• Education Scotland – Letter to Merchiston parents (23 June 2015)*
• Care Inspectorate/Education Scotland – Merchiston External Inspection Report (4 December 2015)*
• Education Scotland – Additional Merchiston surveys (1 February 2016)
• Education Scotland – Letter to Merchiston parents (9 February 2016)*
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (30 June 2016)
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (29 September 2016)
• Education Scotland – Letter to Merchiston parents (15 November 2016)*
• Merchiston Castle School – Standards & Quality Self Report 2015-2016 (1 December 2016)*
• Merchiston Castle School – Standards & Quality Self Report 2016-2017 (1 January 2018)*
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (19 September 2019)
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (1 December 2021)
• Care Inspectorate – Merchiston External Inspection Report (25 November 2025)

An exhausting search

This compilation of 33 documents represents the entirety of Merchiston Castle School inspection reports that I've been able to locate anywhere online in two years.

I've periodically returned to the mission of trying to hunt down historical school inspection reports for Merchiston but end up finding no new reports to expand the archive any further.

This is after an exhaustive search of all available sources—including live websites, exploring internet archives of reorganized websites (which created broken URLs), and searching through internet archives of dead websites (defunct domain names and sites abandoned because either the responsible inspection body changed or the body's name changed).

This mission has often gone to painful extremes. Once, I sat down and plugged in different end numbers at the end of the Care Inspectorate's standard inspection report URL, to try to uncover any orphaned files:
/CS2005101538/evaluation-history/7 etc

At some point between 1 and 50 (I also tried the first 9 digits as 01, 02, etc) the website just starts to return the same report, over and over. So, I'm pretty confident that, at least where the Care Inspectorate is concerned, there are no orphaned inspection reports on the server, no hidden, forgotten files of missing inspection reports that can be found.

I have a data request pending with the Care Inspectorate for all its reports on Merchiston, whose oft-cited joint report with HMIE from October 2014 is missing from their otherwise presumably intact archive spanning the years 2005-2025.

Who is archiving inspection reports?

HMIE has "no current report available" for Merchiston despite its website claiming that reports are published and kept online for five years:

Does this mean that HMIE has not inspected Merchiston since 2021? I feel like the page looked identical throughout 2025. Would that mean there has been no HMIE inspection since 2020?

When you 'need an older report' and do contact HMIE, you get redirected by HMIE.

In a 16 May 2025 response to an email inquiry about available and missing reports, HMIE claimed that the National Library of Scotland has copies of all historical inspection reports:

"Thank you for your email regarding inspection reports for Merchiston Castle School. I can advise that historical inspection reports are available from the National Libraries Scotland."

No historical inspection reports are available

In the course of following up, I found that the National Library of Scotland does not have historical school inspection reports archived nor is it archiving new ones on an ongoing basis.

Of 31 results for a search for "Merchiston Castle School", only five are inspection reports. Library staff have confirmed by email that its public website search results accurately reflect the full extent of their holdings on the school.

Of these five Merchiston inspection reports in the National LIbrary, I had already tracked down four of them. The one I didn't already have archived, "Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh report of an inspection in May and June 1984", is an interesting one, as this external inspection was conducted during the period I was at the school.

But it will cost money to have the Library scan/copy it. In a decade in which a national Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry into abuse in residential care settings is ongoing, all boarding school care and inspection reports should have been freely available to the public.

Obvious problems with the existing list of school inspection reports

Key reports/periods are missing, eg. the October 2014 report cited by the SCAI and in various letters to parents. This was the year following the suicide of longtime Merchiston housemaster James Rainy Brown and the same year in which the school's child protection coordinator later admitted to having begun having sex with school pupils. Context is everything.

There are no pre-2000 inspection reports available. Considering this has been a decade in which a national inquiry has been going back to examine historical child abuse at residential institutions, the general lack of access to raw data from school inspection reports by national bodies is concerning.

Help build the archive

My list does not mean there aren't inspection reports still out there to be discovered—including ones hidden in Internet Archive pathways that I perhaps haven't found yet—but I've been surfing dead URLs for two years now.

As I mentioned above, I have a data request pending with the Care Inspectorate for all its reports on Merchiston. Part of these enquiries have accidently doubled as whistleblowing endeavours, including a note to the inspection bodies that the report archiving systems that everyone assumes are in place are not in fact in place.

If you can track down any inspection reports or related correspondence not listed on the School Inspection Reports page, please use the contact page or secure evidence upload page (to upload PDF files) and help to expand this archive.

Nigel Parry, Research Hub Editor