Teachers to get legal support against parents who defame them amid huge rise in vexatious complaints

[noblegiraffe]

Amid a huge rise in vexatious complaints against schools and teachers, a headteacher has been awarded damages against two parents who conducted a campaign of harassment against him.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/16/secondary-school-teacher-paid-damages-after-alleged-harassment-by-pupils-parents

An academy trust who provide sickness insurance cover will now also cover defamation https://schoolsweek.co.uk/cease-and-desist-trust-supports-staff-to-sue-online-trolls/

"Schools often end up dealing with the same complaint on multiple occasions. This is because parents wishing to complain about a school can submit their grievance to numerous agencies: the Department for Education, the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), Ofsted and the Teaching Regulation Agency, as well as their MP and local media." https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/majority-school-leaders-see-rise-parent-complaints

"In the meantime, the NAHT is seeing school complaints policies “being ignored, and complaints being escalated straight to the DfE or Ofsted”, according to assistant general secretary James Bowen."

Generally, this rise in vexatious parental complaints is unmanageable for schools at a time when services are already stretched to breaking. So if you have a genuine complaint about a teacher or the school

1. follow the school complaints procedure (this should be on their website).
2. do not fire off the complaint to multiple agencies at the same time
3. do not try to whip up a frenzy among parents on social media
4. do not defame teachers on social media
5. do not stalk and harass teachers or their families

I don’t disagree with people being protected if they are targeted. However, as I understand things some of the details are disputed. The police were involved but took no action against the parents. That may be because the police were incompetent or because the police didn’t believe the actions could be proven or that they didn’t teach the threshold for harassment to be made out. I suppose we will never know. I’m glad that the sides were able to reach a settlement.

The £10k the parents agreed to pay included the costs, so what you are saying is untrue.

@Strictly1 SARs and FOIs can be refused if it's believed they're vexatious. Presumably if school are doing them they know they don't have a valid reason to refuse.

I do think there should be an independent body to oversee school complaints and I do think this would help all round. I know the local government and social care ombudsman have suggested they take this on and I hope they do. There are complaints that are indeed vexatious and there are many that are labelled as such but are not. Some independent scrutiny would be helpful for all.

Or the outcome of a court case which resulted in multiple restraining orders?

Regardless of whether this headteacher was doing a poor job or not, the correct course of action never involves setting up abusive facebook groups or turning up at his house or harassing his family.

You're right. I misread.

Still doesn't make him vexatious for asking for a higher amount given what they put him and his partner and children through. He should've got more.

Exactly. Yes, there are always two sides to every story and parents might have had reasonable grounds to complain about the school's approach, but what these parents did to the headteacher and what they tried to enrol other parents to do is unjustifiable.

There were no findings of fact in this case. There was no ‘court case’ in the sense it never got to that stage. There may have been agreed facts but that hasn’t been disclosed. Usually the other side would agree the terms of settlement with no admission as to fact. In all honesty if this teacher’s lawyer was saying I’d have to pay costs of £500k if I lost, I would agree to £10k in a heartbeat.

I think he only wanted £20k damages. The lawyer was asking for £500k had it got to the trail stage.

The parents also accepted ten restrictions on their future behaviour, which suggests facts were agreed between the parties.

Are you denying that there was an abusive facebook group? Are you suggesting that the couple agreed to restraining orders for no reason at all?

Bringing it up during an inspection isn't the same as having to deal with it as a formal complaint being investigated by Ofsted is it. It will be a quick chat.

You seem awfully invested in playing down parents making unnecessary complaints to multiple agencies. Why is that?

As a mum who's kids are grown up, i bloody admire teachers and everything they do. Its such a hard job and getting harder i think. It shouldn't be .

@noblegiraffe because I'm very aware that schools often label complaints as vexatious when they're not.

I made a perfectly valid complaint and pursued it through the correct channels and was labelled vexatious from the off. School complaints are just mates 'investigating' their mates. No one was interested in resolving anything they just wanted us to go away and bullied us throughout. Nothing was ever resolved via the schools complaints procedure.

It was an LA school so the LA could have stepped in at any time but refused to, which meant I was able to complain about the LA to the LGSCO. Funnily enough once an independent organisation was looking into it (the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman) my complaint was upheld. The school never faced any accountability because there isn't any for schools but the fact my complaint was upheld by an independent body demonstrates it was not vexatious.

I'm not going to say vexatious complaints don't exist because I'm sure they do but there's always two sides to every story my question to you is why are you trying to whip people into a frenzy because of one incident where it seems not all the facts are even known?

Complaints happen. Sometimes parents are shit, sometimes schools are bloody shit too. LAs/DfE/Ofsted/the Gov probably sit rubbing their hands in glee that they can play schools and parents off against each other whilst they all get to avoid dealing with the actual issues causing the complaints.

People agree to terms like this all the time for all sorts of reasons. It doesn’t prove anything except they want to settle the case.

I’m surprised, I have never had a school do anything about a complaint I made (to the point I just pulled my kid out altogether), and I have also had friends who were teachers whose complaints about their own schools were ignored regardless of how far up they took them. I don’t think schools are actually responding to complaints at all

We used to fill in forms constantly detailing abuse by pupils and thought they were being sent to the LA. We later found out that the HT wasn't doing this as he didn't want it to reflect badly on his school.

I think if someone wanted a restraining order against me because they claimed that I had been harassing them, posting vile abuse about them on social media and encouraging others to do the same, and I hadn't actually been harassing them at all, I'd let it go to court.

Wouldn't you?

Still, they admit to setting up the Facebook group, and you can see the spamming of a petition to get him removed as headteacher on twitter.

Sometimes the two sides to every story thing is completely unbalanced.

Teacher tells pupils off = one side
teacher picking on pupil = other side.
The reality could be either of these things.

I have seen reasonable complaints against colleagues and totally ridiculous complaints.

Of course it does! If they didn't think they'd done anything wrong they'd fight it in court.

That is so very much off the mark I can’t begin to tell you. If you are facing a potential bill of £500k you would be strongly advised to settle for £10k by your lawyers. No matter how much you believe you will win there are no guarantees by the time to get to court. I would take a £10k hit over £500k, which is life ruining, any day of the week. This is how the civil law system works in practice.
The best way to explain is using the criminal court system is the example of how the postmasters pleaded guilty to crimes they knew they hadn’t committed. They did this because had they been found guilty they would have been sent to prison but if they pleaded, they would have a better chance of receiving a non-custodial sentence.

But the couple did set up an abusive facebook group and co-ordinate social media attacks on this headteacher so suggesting that they settled despite being innocent is a bit of a non-starter.

The article actually says ‘alleged harassment’ so it’s pretty clear from that they haven’t accepted any of the allegations as part of the settlement agreement. I’m not saying they come out of this covered in glory, I’m just stating facts.

It was a cabal of about 6 parents at our school.

Nasty fb posts, in fact a whole fb group dedicated to getting the HT sacked.

It was actually really scary.

People just jump on these groups and have no real understanding of the issues. Vigilantism.

Then the school got a good ofsted which made them even more furious.

The really sad cases were where the parent had mh and/or substance abuse issues. Lots of drunk phone calls/emails, then denying they happened. Threats of violence to staff and governors.

Honestly, people have NO idea.

I have met this head teacher and although it sounds as if the parents went too far I have no sympathy for him. I have nothing positive to say about the man and I know of many others who feel the same.