CHILDREN at a private boarding school were let down by decades of “systemic failures” with house masters free to rule their own “fiefdoms” without oversight, an inquiry has been told.

Between the 1950s and 1990s in particular, boarding pupils at Morrison’s Academy were exposed to school rulers who could discipline them by “whatever means deemed allowable by that house master”, the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard yesterday.

The inquiry has heard evidence of pupil-on-pupil sexual abuse as well as physical beatings and emotional torments endured by children at the school in Crieff, Perthshire, which was established in 1860 and was a boarding school until 2007.

Yesterday, its current rector Gareth Warren repeated the school’s “genuine and heartfelt apology” and agreed there had been decades of “systemic failures” in safeguarding children.

He agreed with inquiry counsel Andrew Brown QC that between the 1950s and 1990s across several different boarding houses “there seemed to be fiefdoms in operation with, in effect, no oversight at all”.

Warren told the inquiry: “The very clear emerging theme right through is that the culture in certain boarding schools was one of delegation of duty to instil discipline and order in boarding houses by whatever means deemed allowable by that house master.”

He said delegating discipline had been an “abdication of duties” by schools.

“That manifested very much in physical abuse and underlying that was emotional abuse, having constant fear about what might happen next.”