Gemma Collinge now feels sickened that, in the aftermath of arriving at the hospital where her infant son lay critically ill, she initially felt huge gratitude to her childminder Karen Foster.

After all, she’d been told it was Karen who, on noticing ten-month-old Harlow was choking on a piece of pasta, had hit his back with force and administered CPR in a desperate bid to revive him once he’d gone into cardiac arrest.

‘I know you saved him,’ an emotional Gemma, 40, told Karen as she gave her a consoling hug.

Five agonising days after being admitted to hospital, Harlow died on March 5, 2022, having never recovered consciousness.

It left Gemma and her partner Allen Frangleton bewildered and grief-stricken at how their healthy, happy baby – a smiley boy who loved Peter Rabbit and pink wafer biscuits – could have come to such grievous harm just an hour after they had dropped him off at an Ofsted-approved carer.

The answer to that question is one they are still wrestling to come to terms with today: Harlow had not choked. He had been shaken to death, his brain injury so catastrophic that one neurosurgeon told the couple he had never seen anything like it.

Karen herself, the woman who had styled herself as a latter-day Mrs Doubtfire, a strict but loveable ‘granny carer’ like the film character, was to blame.

Is there anything worse for a parent to contend with? In Gemma and Allen’s case, they believe there is: only after police launched an investigation into Harlow’s death did they find that parents had flagged concerns to Ofsted about Karen on three separate occasions in the two years before they came into her orbit – with one complaint registered just three months before Harlow died.

None resulted in any action.

Astonishingly, they also learned that Karen, 62 – who falsely claimed to have been a former paediatric nurse and foster carer – was receiving disability benefit from the Department for Work and Pensions for conditions she claimed made her drowsy, immobile and unable to cook or care for herself without help.

Little wonder that alongside Gemma and Allen’s burning grief is a visceral anger at what they see as systemic failures that are as much to blame for their son’s death as Karen’s callousness.

‘She signed an annual review document one day before killing Harlow where she claimed to be terribly disabled. And yet no one questioned why she was able to work with the most vulnerable group of people – babies and toddlers,’ says Gemma.

‘If any of these issues had been followed up, we’d all be in a different situation right now,’ says Allen quietly.

It is the reason they are speaking out today, along with a desire to pay tribute to their beautiful boy, in the aftermath of Karen being sentenced for her crime.

Three weeks ago, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison at Preston Crown Court after pleading guilty to manslaughter at the 11th hour. She had been due to stand trial for his murder but the prosecution accepted a plea of manslaughter.

The basis of her plea was that her ‘forceful shaking’ caused Harlow’s death after he fell out of his high chair and began crying, the court heard.

This version – effectively accepted by the courts as there is now no trial – does not ring true to Allen and Gemma, who point out that Harlow’s dummy and blanket were in Karen’s bedroom suggesting he was last there.

‘And even if he was in a high chair, why wasn’t he strapped in?’ asks Allen. ‘Either way we’ll never know the full details of what happened.’

Indeed, it is hard to know how to even try to unravel the depths of Karen and Allen’s grief and guilt. Both emotions – along with the legion of ‘if onlys’ – are profound, and will surely be understood with a heart-wrenching pang by the millions of working parents across the world who rely on nurseries and childminders in order to pay the bills.

‘I said to Gemma right at the beginning we’re going to have to find a new normal now, because what was normal will never be normal again,’ says Allen.

‘I’m a different person now,’ adds Gemma. ‘I used to be outgoing, happy. Now I can’t wait for the day to end so I can go to bed and go to sleep.’

Their sorrow is written all over their faces when we meet for this, their first interview, and their sense of disbelief remains potent. They were, after all, on the surface an ordinary couple. Both 40 and from Burnley, Lancashire, they were childhood sweethearts who, after splitting, remained friends before reuniting in 2019.

By then Gemma had two teenage daughters from a previous relationship, and Allen had four children of his own.

They admit Gemma’s pregnancy was a surprise – the couple were not even living together when Harlow was conceived – but from the moment he was born in May 2021 he proved a bundle of joy. ‘He was such a smiley, easy baby,’ says Gemma fondly.

As many fathers do, Allen returned to his job – as a heavy machinery operator – within a couple of weeks of Harlow’s birth, but Gemma took a full nine months’ maternity leave from her work in administration before starting to look into childcare options.

She investigated nurseries – only to find her planned working hours of 11am to 5pm did not work well with nursery hours – before being told about Karen by a friend who gave her glowing references.

‘She said she was worth her weight in gold,’ says Gemma. ‘She had other great recommendations as well. What we’ve worked out is that all the references came from people with older children, not babies or toddlers.’

After getting in touch with Karen, Gemma agreed to some settling in sessions in January ahead of her return to work in February.

‘I was used to a nursery environment whereas this was like going round to your grandma’s,’ says Gemma. ‘From the start I had a bit of an odd feeling, but I couldn’t put my finger on why and I put it down to feeling nervous about going back to work and leaving Harlow.’

After some drop-in sessions, Gemma left Harlow for his first full ‘tester’ week of 11am-5pm sessions before she returned to work.

It was not a universal success – Harlow seemed unsettled when she picked him up – but she put it down to teething problems.

Then, on day four, she arrived to find another baby lying face down crying on the hallway floor.

‘I could also hear Harlow crying in the other room. I asked Karen what the hell was going on and she said the other baby’s mum was very strict and told her to put her in the hallway if she was being difficult,’ she says. ‘It seemed odd but I guess at that early stage I was wrapped up in my own baby.’

Gemma also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of children in the house – more than the maximum of six under eight, with only one child under the age of one – which she was legally entitled to have in her care.

‘I asked her about it and she said her husband Joe was Ofsted-registered as well which is why they were allowed to have a larger number,’ she says.

This, along with Foster’s assertions that she had previously been a paediatric nurse and foster carer, was another lie – Joe wasn’t a registered childminder at all. He was never charged with a crime. Nor was Gemma the first to raise questions about the number of children under Karen’s care: it had been pointed out just three months earlier in December 2021 by another mother who wrote to Ofsted of her ‘serious concerns’ about safeguarding after witnessing ten children at the property, unsupervised in a back room with a log burner while Karen was cooking.

‘Babies were distressed, always very untidy, hazards left for children to touch,’ the mum wrote. ‘I’ve picked my children up several times there now and nappies have been wet through, bowel movement and urine seeping through their clothes.’

Two other complaints had also been raised about Karen’s care in the prior two years, one by a woman who said her young son had been slapped around the face after dropping his spoon on the floor, and another about babies going home with dirty nappies and sore bottoms.

Both were determined by Ofsted to be without merit.

Meanwhile, Gemma’s discomfort had mounted enough that by the end of her one-week trial she had already decided to reduce Harlow’s childminder hours and investigate other options.

‘There was just this niggling feeling,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like that situation with the baby in the corridor and I just felt there were too many children around.’

After returning to work, she juggled childcare arrangements with her mother, Allen and a friend, gradually reducing Harlow’s days with Karen to just two a week.

‘Harlow would return home with a full bottle of milk, his vest would be unbuttoned, and he spent the journey home crying his eyes out, but then be his normal self, smiling and laughing,’ says Gemma. ‘When I mentioned it to Karen she said it normally takes about three months to build a bond and that he was a tough nut to crack.’

Gemma did not want to wait to test the theory: it is another grievous turn of fate that not long before their son died, Gemma and Allen had learned they had a nursery place for their son starting in September.

Harlow never made it there: on Tuesday March 1, 2022, Gemma received the phone call at work that would change her life. ‘It was Karen saying Harlow was poorly and was in hospital,’ she recalls.

Their hearts dropping to their stomach, Gemma and Allen raced to Royal Blackburn Hospital to a scene of unfolding horror: Harlow was on life support as medics battled to save his life.

Also present was Karen who, nurses told Gemma, had tried to save Harlow’s life by administering CPR after calling 999 and telling call handlers he had choked, had a fit and wasn’t breathing – although she had then told paramedics at the scene that he had ‘eaten his dinner’ and ‘the next minute he collapsed’.

A CT scan painted a different picture, showing bleeding and swelling in the brain, both symptoms associated with a baby being shaken. Given the severity of his injuries, Harlow was blue-lighted to the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital where once again doctors desperately battled to save his life.

Their efforts were in vain: as a devastated Gemma and Allen were told, Harlow’s injuries – which also included retinal haemorrhaging – were so severe they were incompatible with life.

‘The main neurologist sat us down and said none of them were prepared for what they saw on the scan. He said it was the worst brain injury he’d ever seen,’ Gemma says.

Four days after he arrived at hospital, the couple were told their only option was to remove life support, and Harlow died in their arms 12 traumatic hours later, much of it spent gasping for breath.

‘They told us he wouldn’t be able to breathe for himself, but he did,’ says Gemma through sobs. ‘I was begging them to put him back on life support, but they said there was nothing they could do.’

By then, Karen had been arrested on suspicion of inflicting grievous bodily harm, leaving Gemma and Allen blindsided by the news that the woman they had credited with saving his life was involved in his death.

‘We couldn’t take it in,’ says Gemma. ‘Yes, I’d had my niggles, but this was something else.’

In the bewildering days that followed, there were many other traumas to navigate: Gemma and Allen had hoped to donate their son’s body parts to medical science, only for the police to intervene and say it would not be possible as his body was ‘evidence’.

His funeral – Peter Rabbit themed – had to be delayed after Karen’s defence lawyer requested a second post-mortem.

‘One of her many delaying tactics,’ as Allen puts it grimly.

What’s more, not long after Harlow’s death, Gemma received a phone call from Ofsted telling her she would be unable to use Karen Foster for childcare as there had been an ‘incident with a child’.

‘I said: “Yes, it’s my son. She’s killed my son.” The woman was mortified. It wasn’t her fault, she had just been given a list of numbers to call, but I felt sick,’ says Gemma.

‘How insensitive can you be?’ asks Allen incredulously. ‘It would have taken a split second to check names.’

He points out that beyond that contact they heard nothing from Ofsted until last week, two years after Harlow’s death, agreeing to a meeting in the face of media reports of Karen’s sentencing.

Worse was to follow: rumours swirled locally that it was a member of the couple’s family who was responsible for Harlow’s death – an accusation police told the couple not to refute to protect the case.

‘We weren’t allowed to say that it was actually a childminder, we just had to stay quiet,’ says Gemma. ‘In fact, now she’s pleaded to manslaughter there is no case.’

Once charged with murder, Karen even tried to point the finger of blame at Gemma herself, suggesting she herself was responsible for the brain injury.

‘She also callously suggested that Harlow had previous medical conditions which were to blame – when he was perfectly healthy. It’s been two years of utter lies,’ says Gemma.

Today Karen is, at least, behind bars, although it is scant consolation for Harlow’s devastating loss. He would have turned three in May, and his absence is felt every day.

‘It’s affected so many people – our kids, everyone that loved him,’ says Gemma, who is now on medication for anxiety and depression.

Both Gemma and Allen would like a multi-agency review into what happened, and are campaigning for tighter regulations for childminders including the installation of cameras. They are also hoping to set up a charity in Harlow’s name to support other families in similar situations.

‘None of this will bring him back,’ says Gemma. ‘But if we can do some good then that’s something isn’t it?’

An Ofsted spokesperson said: ‘We were deeply saddened by Harlow Collinge’s shocking and tragic death. We completely understand that Harlow’s parents have questions about Karen Foster’s work as a childminder. Our Regional Director for the North West has invited them to meet him. We’re determined to keep improving our work as the regulator of childcare and it’s vital that we always consider what lessons we can learn from any tragic incident.’

Sadly for little Harlow, any lessons learned will come far too late.

• To sign Gemma and Allen’s petition, visit chng.it/7bnhHyPbg8