Published by The Times on Thursday 13th August 2026
By Tom Ball

Home-schooled teenagers as young as 13 are ‘volunteering’ for little money at a British branch of the church. One girl’s role involved giving massages

In his hands, a 15-year-old boy holds two metal cylinders connected to a device that sends a small electrical current through his body. It is, in effect, a rudimentary lie detector, measuring the sweat produced in his palms when nervous. He is barefoot as tight clothing interferes with the mechanism, supposedly.

“In your recent study, have you encountered any word that you did not fully understand?” his supervisor, a girl of 18, asks him. He is silent. But the device answers for him, momentarily jolting the dial and thereby revealing the gaps in his knowledge of the teachings of an American science fiction writer. 

This boy, who has short brown hair and a voice that is still breaking, does not go to school. Instead, each morning he and several other children come to this unremarkable building among the sooty stone frontages of Edinburgh’s old town to spread the word of L Ron Hubbard, the man whose august portrait hangs in every room.

Known officially as the Hubbard Academy of Personal Independence (Hapi), the building on South Bridge, in the heart of the Scottish capital, is a church of Scientology.

A Times investigation has found that for the past two years the church has been engaging children as young as 13 to work alongside adults in administrative, training and recruitment roles. One teenage girl has a role which involves giving massages to adults, including male staff and members of the public. Scientology denies this.

An undercover reporter spent a week at the church under the guise of studying for a “life improvement course”, and observed children working there.

The church insists they are volunteers, even though they have signed “staff contracts” which require them to work full-time in exchange for desultory pay. Although referred to as staff, the church insists this does not denote employment but the “staffing of training courses” completed by “volunteers”.

Upon joining “staff” they are given the job title of “Hubbard Communication Officer Expeditor” — the equivalent of a human resources role — and tasked with a range of duties including clerical work such as sending letters and shredding documents, in addition to more practical work such as helping to run training sessions with members of the public who come to the church to complete paid-for courses based on Hubbard’s teaching. 

Later they can train for more specialised roles. One girl, who joined staff aged 14 and is now 15, serves as a “Medical Liaison Officer”, according to one former staff member. In her role she administers massages to adult male staff and members of the public as part of a pseudo-medical practice known in Scientology as a “nerve assist”. 

A former senior staff member, Amir Essalhi, claimed that these “assists” took place in a locked room and unsupervised. This is denied by Scientology. After leaving the church earlier this year, Essalhi submitted a report to the police alleging forced labour of children, and exploitation of minors through inappropriate physical contact with adults. However, police closed the case citing a lack of evidence.

The enrolment of children is believed to be the result of pressure from the movement’s global leadership to accelerate expansion. Scientology has spent millions of dollars over recent years buying up high-value properties across the world as part of a growth strategy known as “Ideal Org”. 

However, many outposts have struggled to recruit enough staff and parishioners with which to fill these churches, according to researchers, due to a declining number of believers. 

In 2019 the church bought a modern office building near the Murrayfield rugby stadium with the intention of replacing the site at South Bridge. But seven years later, the building remains empty. 

In an internal email seen by The Times, a senior UK church official wrote to Malcolm Fraser, executive director of Hapi, complaining that the Edinburgh church still did not have the requisite number of staff with which to relocate to the Murrayfield building by 2026. The official set Fraser a target of ten more staff members in post by the end of the year and ten more in full-time training. 

“The command received at the 2024 IAS [International Association of Scientologists, an annual fundraising event] was ‘Man the hell up now,’” the email read. “This is what must be done and what I am writing to you about.”

Scientologists believe that humans are inhabited by an eternal spirit called a “thetan” that passes from body to body through a process of reincarnation. A child is therefore not distinct from an adult as both bodies are inhabited by a thetan that is trillions of years old. 

During the 1970s when Scientology’s senior leadership took to the seas on a repurposed cattle ferry, Hubbard employed several pre-teen girls to act as messengers who would relay his orders around the ship. 

For several decades the church also operated the “Cadet Org”, an organisation intended to raise and train the children of senior Scientologists. Though disbanded in the early 2000s, the Cadet Org has since become a recurring source of lawsuits from former members alleging forced child labour. 

In 1984, a High Court judgment stated that Scientology was “out to capture people, especially children and impressionable young people, and indoctrinate and brainwash them so that they become the unquestioning captives and tools of the cult”.

The role of “staff members” at a church of Scientology — which is a legally recognised religion in the UK — differs significantly from that of a traditional church volunteer, priest or verger. More akin to a corporate employee, their role is to sell courses to members of the public and attract more parishioners.

There are about 25 “staff members” at Hapi, of which four are children below the age of 16. Another girl, who recently turned 16, joined “staff” when she was 14. Two other children, aged 14, are also attending the church on a daily basis though are not believed to be on staff at present. 

With the exception of one girl, they are all registered by their parents as home-schooled, thereby allowing them to come to the church each day. 

Three children under 16 are living apart from their parents who are 450 miles south in East Grinstead, West Sussex, where its UK headquarters are based. The other children are the sons and daughters of longstanding members of the community in Scotland.

Scottish law does not require home-schooling parents to teach their children a particular curriculum and nor does it stipulate that children must be taught during school hours. 

But it does state that home-schooled children below the age of 16 are not allowed to be employed in work during standard school hours in term time. Any employer who does hire a child of that age to do any form of work must apply for a child employment permit.

In response to The Times’s findings, the church stated that “no person under the age of 16 is a member of staff at the Church of Scientology in Edinburgh”. It did not respond to whether or not they had obtained a child employment permit. 

A spokesman said those who sign contracts, which lawyers described as “volunteering agreements”, “do so entirely as volunteers”. These agreements are described as “staff contracts” in internal documents. 

“Naturally, children are involved in the life of places of worship in every religion present in Scotland,” he said. “We are no different. Like other religions we allow some older children to help out in our church. 

“Any volunteer participation is done within all the rules prescribed by law, and in the context of normal child safeguarding and protection policies and practices.”

Lawyers for Scientology said that the document was a “volunteering agreement” and was “not a contract of employment” but a religious pledge. They added that there was no “mutuality of obligations, which is an absolute requirement for a contract of employment to exist”. They said that they are not paid but are given a discretionary allowance, the processing of which through the payroll system is a matter of convenience and agreed with HMRC.

Scientology was created by Hubbard, a pulp fiction writer from the Rocky Mountains, who in the latter half of his life turned his hand to constructing a vast and byzantine system of religious belief that draws as much on spirituality as it does on self-help, psychotherapy and science fiction. 

Its foundational text is Dianetics, a book published in 1950 amid rising interest in psychoanalysis in America, which offers a do-it-yourself guide to improving your mental health by revisiting traumatic memories. Hubbard later claimed that many of those who tried Dianetics had found themselves being able to recall memories from past lives, which led to him declaring the discovery of the thetan. 

Over the years, his writings on the thetan evolved into a baroque space opera involving an ancient extraterrestrial dictator called Xenu who imprisoned the thetans on planet earth. The story of Xenu is among the most highly-classified texts in Scientology. It is only revealed to those who have ascended to the uppermost echelons of the religion, usually spending hundreds of thousands of pounds in the process. 

In Scientology’s official telling, Hubbard was one of the greatest visionaries who ever lived. While still a child he travelled to Tibet and studied with the last in a line of royal magicians descended from the court of Kublai Khan. Later he was a Second World War hero and then a highly sought-after Hollywood scriptwriter. 

Much of this hagiography, however, is not true. According to Bare-Faced Messiah, a biography written by the former Sunday Times reporter Russell Miller, Hubbard fabricated almost everything he ever said about himself. Multiple court judgments have been damning. In 1984, a High Court judge in London described him as a “charlatan and worse”, and deemed Scientology to be “corrupt, sinister and dangerous … and has as its real objective money and power for Mr Hubbard.” 

In more recent years, documentaries and books by former members have exposed some of the church’s abusive practices, including systematic harassment of its detractors and the enforced severance of relations between friends and family members considered subversive. 

Nevertheless the movement lives on. In Britain there are five churches, including Hapi, as well as Saint Hill in East Grinstead, a Georgian manor house where Hubbard lived from 1959 to 1966 which serves as the movement’s spiritual home. Scientology claims to have millions of followers, but researchers estimate it to have no more than about 50,000 worldwide, including 1,844 people in Britain according to the 2021 census, a 24 per cent decline on the census of a decade earlier.

While the number of followers may be falling, the church still retains some powerful acolytes. Hollywood actors including Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Elisabeth Moss continue to provide the movement with a sheen of glamour. 

David Miscavige, who has led Scientology since Hubbard’s death in 1986, has proved highly successful in eliciting donations from its wealthiest members. Robert Duggan, a billionaire venture capitalist, and his ex-wife Trish have given at least $360 million over the past decade, according to reports. Trish Duggan has also donated more than $10 million to President Trump. He rewarded her by last year appointing her to the the John F. Kennedy Centre board of trustees, of which he is chairman. 
‘Being on staff is one of the best things anyone could do!’

The Times began investigating the church in Edinburgh after speaking to a former staff member who had worked as an executive at Hapi for two years before leaving Scientology in early 2026.

Essalhi was a teenager when he first entered Scientology’s orbit in late 2022. As an 18-year-old student at film school he was curious about the religion that counted among its followers so many Hollywood stars. 

Intrigued by the claim that Scientology is philosophy applied to real life, Essalhi was soon coming in on a daily basis completing courses on everything from relationships to financial stability.

Then at the start of 2024 three senior members of staff, including the executive director Fraser, returned to Edinburgh after three years training in Clearwater, Florida — Scientology’s equivalent of the Vatican City. Essalhi says that they brought with them a directive to rapidly increase the number of staff members at the church as part of the wider global expansion drive.

Shortly after the trio’s return, Essalhi was asked to join staff. He was initially reluctant to do so given the commitment required but eventually agreed. Within a few months he was working up to 100 hours a week, he claims, forcing him to drop out of film school. 

About the same time the church began recruiting minors from among the children of members of the community. Essalhi claims that, like him, several of the children were reluctant to join but were persuaded to do so over the course of several meetings with senior executives who flew in from the US.

He claimed: “Scientology can’t recruit people. The buildings are empty and they can’t get enough staff members. So the strategy goes into internal recruitment. [They think] ‘Well, what if I can get my mum involved? What if I can get my cousin involved? What if I can get my nephew, my daughter, my whatever?’ 

“So when those guys came back [from Clearwater], it was go, go, go. There was a significant amount of pressure to get as many staff as possible, because now they’ve come back, they’ve got all of the training, they know all of the policy, it’s been drilled for three years.”

The contracts that new staff members sign, known as an Application for Active Participation and Religious Pledge, commit them to either two-and-a-half or five years of “actively forwarding the work of the church”.

A separate document detailing what is expected of “staff members” sets out working hours and remuneration. Unusually, it also prohibits any relation among staff members to “intelligence agencies either by past history or immediate familiar connections”.

The document also states that candidates are required to go through a security check that involves being interviewed using the lie detector device — known as an “e-meter” — to check for “any potential sources of trouble in the applicant’s life”. The same device is also used in training to test whether churchgoers have fully understood Hubbard’s teaching. 

Staff members’ “pay”, which the church says is an allowance, is calculated on the basis of how many courses it has sold that week. Data, seen by The Times, which is processed in the church’s payroll system, shows the maximum “wage” paid to a member of staff at the church for one week in January was £249.74. Some staff, including minors, were paid as little as £62.44. 

After each child joined “staff”, a photograph of them smiling and holding their newly signed contract was posted on the WhatsApp group for Hapi staff members.

They were later asked to write glowing testimonies about their decision to join up, which were circulated on promotional material encouraging others to apply. One girl wrote, shortly after being recruited: “I think being on staff is one of the best things anyone could do! I’m so thankful to LRH [Hubbard] for all his amazing work, thanks to him I know there is a way to solve things.”

The same girl, who is now 16, now works as a recruiter for the church and makes videos of other staff members describing how glad they were to join. 

Apostate Alex

Essalhi said that before joining Scientology he was oblivious to the bad press. However, during his time in the church he gradually became more aware of some of the criticisms and began doing his own research. Eventually it led him to speaking with Alex Barnes-Ross, one of Scientology’s foremost critics and a former member who joined the church aged 15, became its London director of book sales at 17, and then left two years later. 

The pair spoke on the phone several times privately before eventually Essalhi agreed to appear on Barnes-Ross’s podcast, Apostate Alex. They had an open and friendly conversation and afterwards Essalhi thought little of it, despite being warned by Barnes-Ross that the church would look very poorly on one of its current staff members speaking to a declared “suppressive person”. 

He was right. Over the next two weeks, Essalhi says he was subjected to repeated “interrogations” from Fraser and Scott Wordie, director of special affairs in Dublin. 

As punishment he claims that he was put on “hard manual labour”, working to renovate a room on the ground floor of the church that was being turned into a shop selling Scientology books. He did one day before deciding to quit. 

Scientology claimed that it has been “the target of sustained anti-religious and discriminatory rhetoric” by Barnes-Ross. He said that he has “nothing against Scientology’s so-called religious beliefs. Rather, I am calling for an end to their abusive practices and I welcome the day this church approaches survivors with empathy and compassion rather than attacking those who speak out.”

Lawyers for the church denied that Essalhi had worked for up to 100 hours a week and claimed he worked a schedule of four days a week. They added that Essalhi had “betrayed” church staff by “engaging in covert and deceptive behaviour”.

Disconnection

It is now several months since Essalhi left the church and he is still coming to terms with his experience. He says he no longer believes in any of Hubbard’s teachings and considers the religion to be a “scam” that takes advantage of people’s emotions.

Shortly after resigning, he reported the church to Police Scotland but was told the case was closed for lack of evidence. A spokesman for the force told The Times that no criminality had been established, but added that “any further information provided will be assessed”.

In June Essalhi, Barnes-Ross and a group of other ex-Scientologists delivered a petition to No 10 calling on the government to investigate the church over allegations of coercive control, abuse and forced labour. 

In some ways Essalhi was fortunate. He did not lose any of his family and friends. He plans to resume his studies at film school. But due to the acrimonious nature of his departure none of his former colleagues — some of whom he considered friends — will speak to him, having been told to “disconnect”, he says.

It is this threat of disconnection that provides the organisation with the “leverage” that prevents people from leaving, Essalhi believes. Leaving is more difficult still for those who have family members within the church or who grow up within it.

“A child born into Scientology grows up with Scientologist parents, Scientologist friends, Scientologist mentors, and often an entire social world that exists within the organisation,” Essalhi said. 

“If they later experience abuse, witness wrongdoing, or simply decide they no longer believe, they are not just weighing up whether to leave a religion. They are weighing up whether to risk losing their parents, siblings, friends, community and support network in the process. 

“Former members have often described this as the greatest barrier to leaving. The fear is not of being wrong. The fear is of being alone and losing all of your family members.”