Abuse at a north London nursery: The disturbing, perplexing case of Vincent Chan

It began with a single complaint. In May 2024, a colleague made a report to Camden council about the conduct of Vincent Chan, a worker at a nursery on Finchley Road in West Hampstead run by Bright Horizons, one of London’s biggest early years operators. According to the colleague, Chan had been using work iPads to film mocking videos of the children in the nursery and sharing them with his colleagues.

In the months that followed, the police dug into what they initially thought was a case of child cruelty. Eventually, they discovered evidence that he had been sexually abusing multiple children under his care. The Met have called it one of the most harrowing and complex child sexual abuse investigations the force has undertaken. It's also one that raises questions about their own performance.

This morning, Chan pled guilty to 26 charges related to the sexual assault of multiple children and the making and taking of indecent images of those children. The majority of the offences took place on the grounds of the nursery he worked in and many were documented using nursery-issued devices.

We’ve been digging into the case for the past few weeks, after first receiving a tip about letters being sent to local families by the police. We spoke to local community figures, police detectives and lawyers representing the families, all to try to understand how Chan was able to commit these crimes undetected for such a prolonged period. We’ve also examined the inspection reports of dozens of other nurseries operated by the multi-billion-pound Bright Horizons chain in London and found a pattern of safeguarding failures. 

The leading human rights law firm Leigh Day has now been instructed by the families whose children were targeted by Chan to represent them in a civil action they plan to take against Bright Horizons.

The two arrests 

In a case like this, there’s no way to conceal the horror of what happened. The rest of this article contains details some readers may find distressing.

Vincent Chan first started working at the Bright Horizons nursery in 2017, when he was in his late thirties. He had no criminal record and passed all background checks needed to work in an education setting. He was quickly promoted to the role of nursery nurse, a position he held for most of the ensuing seven years he spent working at the company. It was a role that left him responsible, among other things, for cleaning and clothing the children, aged between two and four years old.

In May 2024, a fellow staff member reported Chan to the nursery and Camden council, over concerns about strange videos of children at the nursery he was making using a work-issued iPad, to which he then added graphics and music. He then shared stills of this supposedly comedic footage with his colleagues. 

Chan was arrested on suspicion of child cruelty in June 2024, and the police subsequently confiscated 25 digital devices from his home and workplace. After his arrest, he was suspended from the nursery.

What happened next is curious. The Met’s statement today says that forensic teams “trawled through the devices, where they uncovered substantial amounts of indecent images and videos of children, including evidence of contact sexual offences against children.” But it was only on 8 September this year — 14 months after his initial arrest — that Chan was arrested again and charged with child sexual offences.

At a Met briefing last week attended by The Londoner, officers suggested that the devices may not have been fully searched right after the June 2024 arrest because, at that time, the allegation concerned videos that were mocking in nature, rather than ones that captured sexual abuse. We have asked the force for some additional on record comments about the reasons for that delay, but have yet to receive a response.

Chan was re-arrested three days after the first evidence of child sexual abuse was discovered, and charged with an array of offences including multiple counts of assault of a child by penetration, assault of a child by touching and further offences related to the production and use of indecent imagery related to those assaults.

His victims were sexually assaulted on the premises of the Bright Horizons nursery. The assaults were documented in many cases using workplace iPads, supposed to be used to update parents about children's progress and wellbeing. At present, four victims have been identified by police. 

Approximately 700 local families whose children attended the now-closed nursery in the seven years Chan worked there have been sent letters informing them of the offences, while the families of the identified victims are receiving specialist support.

As each of the 26 charges were read out in Wood Green Crown Court today, Chan, wearing grey prison-issue clothes, muttered a plea of “guilty” to each. His head was bowed, making his words almost inaudible to a courtroom packed with families and journalists.

“This is an absolutely shocking case: even as an experienced abuse claims lawyer, it is difficult to hear the descriptions of Chan’s sexual offences against such very young, defenceless children, as well as wider concerns about maltreatment of the children in his care,” said Alison Millar, head of the abuse team and partner at law firm Leigh Day. “The families we are in contact with feel very strongly that there were major failings of safeguarding at Bright Horizons Finchley Road nursery.”

“Child sexual abuse is one of the most horrific crimes imaginable, and Chan’s offending spanned years, revealing a calculated and predatory pattern of abuse,” said Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford, who led the Met’s investigation, in a statement ahead of the hearing. “He infiltrated environments that should have been safe havens for children, exploiting the trust of families and the wider community to conceal his actions and prey on the most vulnerable.” He added that their investigations into Chan are still ongoing, as they have yet to finish reviewing the data salvaged from 69 different digital devices of his that have now been confiscated, and to assess his behaviour in previous roles.

There are questions for the Met about its failure to process Chan’s devices properly when they first arrested him. But there will also be scrutiny of the nursery chain Bright Horizons, the capital’s biggest private early years provider, which managed the centre where Chan committed his horrific crimes undetected over the course of at least three years.

A formal inquiry is now being launched, called a Child Safeguarding Practice Review, which will be overseen by the local council into potential safeguarding failures that may have played a role in Chan’s offending and any lessons that should be learned from the case. That inquiry, which Bright Horizons says it is “committed to supporting”, is separate from the legal case Leigh Day and the families are planning to bring against Bright Horizons.

Analysis: A pattern of failure

Bright Horizons is the third biggest nursery chain in the UK, with 92 sites situated across London alone.

As we’ve written about before, nurseries have become big business in London, attracting major chains and private equity firms. Bright Horizons was already a major early years conglomerate in the US — it’s worth $5.5 billion and its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It launched its UK business over 20 years ago, hoovering up rivals and growing to over 270 nurseries across the country.

The Londoner spent the week ahead of Chan’s hearing assessing the Ofsted records of Bright Horizons nurseries in the capital. We found that over half — 54 of the 92 centres we analysed — had either received a failing grade from Ofsted, or seen a serious safeguarding incident or complaint escalated to the regulator. At many of those sites, as many as three safeguarding concerns were investigated by Ofsted (in one case, a nursery had three incidents in less than a year) but would remain open.

Only the most serious issues are ever escalated to the regulator for investigation or assessment, but most of those Ofsted reports are sparse on details about what the specific incidents or complaints relate to. None of the documents we reviewed concerned the sexual abuse of children under Bright Horizons’ care. Given the safeguarding inquiry is ongoing, there is currently no evidence of a specific failing by Bright Horizons that allowed Chan to commit his crimes. 

But the company’s broader record is worth examining. The Ofsted reports show Bright Horizons nurseries failing to keep a written record of all accidents or injuries that happen at the nursery, not properly supervising children while they played and even failing to do enhanced criminal records checks on those working on the nursery premises.

In 2023, a nursery run by the firm in North London was temporarily shut down for two weeks by Ofsted inspectors over concerns for the children’s safety, with inspectors later calling on the nursery to “ensure all staff are trained in safeguarding and child protection procedures, in particular when dealing with allegations against staff, and unexplained injuries”. Four years before, a nursery worker at a Bright Horizons in Fulham was convicted of assaulting one of the children after they were caught on camera swinging the child’s cot back and forth and repeatedly pushing the youngster’s head down with a blanket in an effort to try and get them to sleep.

Further incidents have been recorded at Bright Horizons nurseries outside the capital. In 2022, the company was fined £800,000 after a toddler named Fox Goulding choked to death at one of their sites in Edinburgh. The staff member supposed to be monitoring Goulding had left the room to go to the toilet, and an ensuing investigation found that staff at the site assigned to do other tasks frequently failed to supervise children.

Meanwhile, in a nursery run by Bright Horizons in Chigwell in Essex, Ofsted inspectors in 2019 found children's safety and welfare was “significantly compromised” and they were at “risk of harm” thanks to poor management. They found that children were leaving the nursery without staff noticing and that “unauthorised persons” were able to gain entry to the site.

Clearly, accidents and mistakes happen in many nurseries, not just ones operated by Bright Horizons. And yet, the Ofsted reports suggest the company has a particular problem. The Londoner found that concerns have been raised at 59% of Bright Horizons London-based nurseries since 2019. This sets it apart from a lot of the other nursery giants operating in the UK. Among the other biggest nursery chains in the UK, two others (Busy Bees and Bright Stars) have a significant presence in the capital, but according to our calculations, the rate of failed inspections or serious concerns getting raised with Ofsted was lower — at 47% and 42% respectively.

A spokesperson for Bright Horizons stressed that they operate in “one of the most heavily regulated sectors in the country” and that they've “significantly invested in staff and training in recent years to further strengthen quality and safety”. They added that The Londoner's data does “not show a complete or up-to-date picture” and that all its nurseries previously given poor Ofsted grades are now rated “Outstanding, Good, or MET” (Met is a new term for inspections that meet basic standards). On the scale of serious safeguarding incidents, they suggested they are “never complacent when safeguarding breaches or quality lapses occur, and promote a learning culture to ensure we can keep improving”.

“What happened at our former nursery was an appalling breach of trust by one individual and it is devastating for the families affected,” the spokesperson added. “This individual acted alone, and his actions in no way represent the work that our trained and dedicated staff do in looking after thousands of children every day.”

In a later statement, they added that they have “extensive safeguarding practices in place”, including “rigorous recruitment vetting and checking procedures”. “Whilst this individual’s actions came to light after a colleague raised concerns and followed our whistle-blowing procedures to report him, we fully accept that the evidence shows the individual was able to commit these crimes despite our safeguarding measures,” they added. “In light of this, we have commissioned an external expert in this field to undertake a full review of our safeguarding practices.”

Chan’s sentencing will take place on 23 January. But for many of the families whose lives have been shattered by his crimes, questions still remain about why Chen was able to get away with these offences for so long.

"As parents we are still trying to process the sickening discovery that our children were subjected to despicable abuse by Vincent Chan at Bright Horizons nursery,” the families of the victims said in a statement read outside the courthouse after the hearing. “We feel that Bright Horizons has failed us, and we want answers.”

The questions the answers to may be obvious, but they bear repeating. “How was someone like Vincent Chan employed? Why did safeguarding systems fail completely? And how were such horrific crimes against children able to continue for so long without the staff responsible for safeguarding at Bright Horizons nursery acting?” 

The families go on: “We are concerned that failures in management and supervision at Bright Horizons allowed this abuse to go undetected, and we are committed to securing accountability for our children.”

If you think your family may have been affected by the incidents mentioned in this piece, please ring the dedicated NSPCC helpline that has been set up on 0800 028 0828. Child protection specialists will be able to advise and take any necessary action to ensure the right support is put in place for every family. Anyone seeking to make a report about Chan can contact the Met at OpLanark@met.police.uk.

To contact a journalist at The Londoner, please email editor@the-londoner.co.uk.