With most recent additions at the top, here's what has been added to the site recently—in terms of both content and functionality. If you're looking for the latest news from the media and other sources, click on NEWS in the site menu.
17 September 2026 - Latest news from the PE1979 petitioners, who are calling for an inquiry into inquiries and the appointment of a National Whistleblowing Officer for Education and Children’s Services in Scotland. The Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament have agreed to keep the petition open and took some action.
More work on School Inspections Reports in the Documents Library. There are now 34 documents from all bodies—HMIE, Education Scotland, the Care Commission, the Care Inspectorate, SCAI, and the school itself—archived in this section. A FOI is in with the Care Inspectorate to seek historical records. Their website archive of Merchiston inspection reports is inexplicably incomplete during key periods—missing key documents. Remaining work to do includes adding a note to titles denoting self-inspections, tagging remaining reports, and commenting where appropriate.
13 September 2026 - James Rainy Brown's death certificate has been added to this website. It was procured as no media reports or Internet text searches have turned up the exact address of his residence in Colinton, in which he was widely reported and multiple people have stated under oath was the location in which he hanged himself on 29 April 2013, shortly after hearing there was a police investigation into him from then-headmaster Andrew Hunter.
His address was 21 Redford Drive, Edinburgh EH12 0BG, half a mile's walk from the school's main gates. This document was included as James Rainy Brown's exact address seems to exist nowhere else online, it is known that he hosted pupils at this address, and the simple capability to see the home on a map may assist with survivor memory and testimony.
9 September 2026 - Recent additions include School Inspections Reports in the Documents Library, an ongoing struggle. Historical reports are proving hard to track down—even with the assistance of the Internet Archive—as many of the PDFs from organizations like HMIE were not retained on their websites and have not been captured. Data requests have and will continue to be filed.
Why are historical school inspection reports important? With a mixture of personal experience from attending the school as eyewitnesses and informed hindsight—i.e. we now know what was concurrently going on as reports were written from later news reporting of stories of abuse at Merchiston beginning in earnest in 2013 and even the 'tip of the iceberg' findings of the problematic Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry—these reports are revealed to be fundamentally inadequate, flawed, and often highly misleading. The inspection reports' lack of worth—obvious from how badly they got it wrong—is a testimony to why abuse was rampant at the school.
26 August 2026 - Much work has been going on since launch to enhance "findability" of material on the site. Standard WordPress search functionality doesn't include tag titles (the BY TOPIC section of this website) or allow toggling by date and relevance in results. Both have been built into this website with custom scripting. The key work of tagging obfuscated PDF documents is still very much ongoing. As time passes, and more pages with image-only PDFs are comprehensively tagged, both the BY TOPIC and search functions will steadily improve.
That every word of PDFs are not going to be searchable—despite there being plugins that can do that for non-image PDFs that have searchable text—is actually a bonus. Where PDFs on this site from SCAI are indeed searchable (top left of PDF embed), not having full PDF in the main site search is good as this reduces irrelevant content in search results.
An example of how that works: If you use the top right search box on the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry website to search for "Merchiston", the search will return even peripheral mentions of the school, eg. a 50 page testimony from an Edinburgh Academy witness who only mentions "Merchiston" once as a rugby team the school played against. This leaves you having to read all 50 pages to figure out that it's not what you're looking for.
SCAI has many image-only PDFs that do mention Merchiston but will not return the document in results. So manual tagging avoids this pitfall while increasing relevance. Note that everything in the NEWS section is already tagged and new items are tagged when they are added to the site. Those are already good to go. PDF document-tagging is very much an ongoing process. As time goes on, other search functionality (eg. date ranges) may be added but there's already more than enough work to do.
16 August 2026 - Sign the PE1979 petition to ask the Scottish Government to establish an independent inquiry and an independent national whistleblowing officer to investigate concerns about the alleged mishandling of child safeguarding enquiries by public bodies.
4 August 2026 - Site launched.
