The teenager spent the next two days tying nooses from ropes in the garden, leaving them scattered around the property. He showed them to the other two kids at Ivy Cottage and told them explicitly he was gearing up to hang himself.

That Saturday evening, less than 48 hours after hurting himself in the bathroom, Aaron put on his best suit while the other kids were playing Xbox. Announcing he wanted “peace and quiet” to write some rap lyrics, he shut himself in an empty room. This time when a staff member knocked, no reply came. Aaron had hanged himself.

Aaron’s 2010 suicide should have been a wakeup call. In response, Keys claimed to “do our utmost” to keep children safe and promised to improve its “already robust care processes”. But a BuzzFeed News investigation today exposes how, in the ensuing years, Keys continued to cut costs and chase revenues in ways that put children’s lives in serious danger.

Keys says these allegations are historical — new owners who took over in 2017 have installed “completely new senior management” and “invested significantly” in care for children. Keys’ overall profit margin in its most recent public accounts was 5%, the company said, a “far cry” from the 42% per home mentioned by the former employee.

BuzzFeed News has uncovered calamitous failings across a sector now dominated by for-profit companies. Private providers charge taxpayers hefty sums, but their care homes have been rated subpar more often than homes run by nonprofits or local governments, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of the latest available regulator data. Last week we exposed how the nation’s largest provider, Cambian, moved to cut costs and fill beds to please investors — while children in its care suffered violent assaults and lived in decrepit conditions.

Shown BuzzFeed News’ findings of both Cambian and Keys, the chair of the powerful parliamentary education committee said he would be “discussing the matter” with the other committee members. “These allegations of the mistreatment of some of society’s most vulnerable young people by these companies are extremely troubling, and should be investigated thoroughly,” said Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow.



BuzzFeed News interviewed dozens of former Keys staff, childcare professionals, social workers, and local police forces; analysed hundreds of government inspection reports; and obtained a leaked cache of over 800 internal company documents as well as police records, forensic reports, and the damning confidential “serious case review” conducted by local authorities to determine whether Aaron Leafe’s death could have been prevented.

Our investigation has found:

Under pressure to fill homes and meet profit goals, Keys management continued to place vulnerable children in the same homes as violent peers — with “traumatic” results.

Children in Keys homes have been sexually abused, physically assaulted, recruited into gangs, and allowed to self-harm. In just a three-month span in 2016, there were 15 reports of possible child sexual exploitation among the 230 children in Keys homes.

Councils continued to pay Keys vast sums: up to £400,000 per year for the care of a single child. That’s almost 10 times the cost of sending a child to Eton College. Yet Keys homes and staff remained starved of resources.

Overburdened Keys employees allowed children to go missing thousands of times in a single year, documents show. That’s a rate that far eclipses the rest of the residential care system, statistics from a similar timespan suggest.

Keys says that it has “undergone substantial change” and put its problems behind it since 2017, when the private equity firm G Square Capital bought a majority stake in the company that February and installed new management that August. “Our absolute priority is to provide high-quality care for the children we support,” Keys chief executive Trish Lee said in a statement.

The company said it “would not be appropriate” to discuss Aaron’s death or anything else that occurred before the G Square Capital takeover, because those incidents “relate to the previous administration”. Keys also provided BuzzFeed News with its own current figures on inspection grades and children going missing, which it said showed that the company is now “providing standards of care higher than the national average”.

The vast majority of the problems detailed in this article occurred before the G Square Capital takeover. But even since the takeover, inspectors have found alarming issues inside some Keys homes. A child at one “continued to be assaulted, verbally and physically, until she was moved to another home”; a second home put children “at extreme risk of exploitation”; at a third, staff reported feeling “unsafe”.

Most of the troubling post-takeover inspection reports cited by BuzzFeed News came before G Square Capital installed new management, Keys said; the others were only a month into the new leadership’s reign. Lee said in her statement that she and other executives have moved quickly to overhaul the company’s culture — but that it takes time to institute the reforms. “It would be unreasonable to suggest that any new leadership team could overnight effect significant organisational change,” she said. Some troubled homes have already received improved inspection grades, Lee added.

Before the takeover, Keys was owned by two Belfast-born businessmen, Don and James Patterson, who are also known for investing in property. This spring, the Times valued their wealth at €62 million. James Patterson declined to comment on a letter detailing allegations in this article from during the brothers’ tenure, which includes Aaron’s death. “We appreciate you sending that,” he said of the letter, “but unfortunately we can’t respond.”

As with any suicide, it is impossible to know exactly what led Aaron to kill himself. But the official review of his death was unsparing: Keys failed him.