Boarding school girl killed herself before her f irst detention
THE father of a 16-year-old girl who took her own life at a top boarding school has revealed she had become ‘hyper-fixated’ on her first-ever detention.
Caitlyn Scott-Lee was found in a wooded area, near a playing field, at £44,000-a-year Wycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire the day before she was due to face the punishment.
Her father Jonathan, a senior executive at HSBC, said the talented pupil made a heartbreaking final entry in her diary in which she thanked her friends for their love, wished them luck and said goodbye.
The teenager, who was about to sit her GCSEs, had been reprimanded after vodka and a tattoo kit were found in her locker before the Easter holidays.
In her final diary entry Caitlyn told how she had run away from a school trip to Eton College in March as a ‘cry out for help’, but that ‘you [Wycombe] responded with “we’d normally punish you but you’re already getting punished”.’ Writing the night before she died on April 21, she said: ‘I hope this is my last diary entry. I want to kill myself tomorrow.’ She had been due to face a two-hour punishment, known as a ‘headmistress’s detention’.
Mr Scott-Lee, 41, told The Sunday Times: ‘She was mortified to receive a detention. To some of us, it is a badge of honour. But Caitlyn seemed hyper-fixated on the concept of a detention and it seems she was determined to do anything she could to avoid it.’ Caitlyn, who was autistic, had asked her housemistress for the detention to be upgraded to a suspension as she was dreading it so much. Mr ScottLee said autistic people ‘tend to think of the world in binary terms – it can be difficult [for them] to differentiate between two extremes’.
He is calling on Rishi Sunak to help open up a national conversation, encouraging high-performing schools like Wycombe to better support neurodiverse pupils.
In an email to parents of children in Caitlyn’s year, headmistress Jo Duncan said the pupils ‘are very shocked and upset’, adding: ‘We will do our utmost to provide the additional pastoral care the girls will need.’ Wycombe Abbey has said safeguarding its pupils is its ‘highest priority’.