Police arrest parents who slate school on class WhatsApp

[noblegiraffe]

A primary school sought advice from the police after '“a high volume of direct correspondence and public social media posts” that had become upsetting for staff, parents and governors.' and the police response was to send 6 officers to their house to arrest the couple making the posts and put them in a cell all day.

Although the couple sound like an absolute pain in the arse who should pack it in, 6 police officers seems like a teensy bit of overkill, particularly with the amount of crime currently going uninvestigated. But with schools faced with spiralling numbers of vexatious parental complaints, something needs to happen. I think some unions are starting to offer legal advice and template solicitor letters for this situation.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/d8c8566b-99b1-45c6-814b-008042d74a3a?shareToken=6deab807d148cf7695ed4d9d3664c51e

You have far too much faith in the competence of the police.

Actually we can look at the fact that the number of parental complaints to e.g. Ofsted has risen massively in the last few years but the number of complaints that have required Ofsted to take action hasn’t risen by a corresponding amount. We can conclude that parents are more “complainy” than they used to be.

Perfectly reasonable to ask the police for advice because you don’t like someone’s body language?

This is getting more and more absurd.

Given that the Times has found this and that the school hasn't spoken to them, it must be a statement from somewhere.

Or, that is evidence that OFSTED are not doing their job properly. They state they won’t take action in “individual cases” and will “put them on file to take into account (whatever that means) when they next inspect the school” (which may be many years away) so dismiss many complaints that - if they were a competent regulator - they would be taking enforcement action on. It by no means indicates these complaints are not valid. Indeed, when parents do take the complaints through to tribunal they almost always win.

Education is the only sector I’m aware of where the parent (patient or customer in other sectors) is expected to personally take the legal action to uphold their rights rather than the regulator and professional bodies doing so.

There’s no evidence in the article of “bitching on social media”. It states that the school didn’t like the fact the parents criticised the school in private whatsapp message groups and a private facebook group for support for parents of children with SEND. None of the messages were public messages as you imply.

It hasn't been disclosed publicly, Sunshineandoranges, though presumably it was provided to the police so they could investigate

The parents were arrested, doubtless "On suspicion of ..." as most people are, and police subsequently decided to bring no charges

And despite the endless speculation that's really all we know

There os nothing in the article that says that the staff were not dong their jobs.

I had a parent who used to email throughout the night, so when I logged on, there would be a barrage of accusatory messages. I could tell how her drinking had progressed as the night went on.

Sadly, her behaviour escalated to the point that she was also harassing her neighbours, and eventually her children were taken into care because she was jailed.

In all three cases you state that they "later" were awarded ECHPs, at the point of communication the school was doing what was required on law.

You might have missed the part where the police felt concerned enough to investigate and detain them because of their behaviour, after acknowledging the father entering school property after being banned, seeing both their communication and then concern and intimidation experienced by the staff trying to do their jobs.

Police don’t do that for nothing. The parents were out of order. It’s a poor example for children and a poor way of treating staff in schools. Hopefully this is a learning curve and they’re happy with the new school.

The school are getting a lot of stick - but they were being harrassed, after doing what they could they took advice from the police. They don't get to decide what the police do next.
I was listening to LBC, I thought this was interesting info about the number of police sent. 3 cars, 6 police people. The cars have to be occupied by two officers. Each person being arrested has to travel in a separate car. Then another car is needed to deal with making sure the child at home is cared for.
Having worked with schools for many years I am sure there's more to this story than the parents are letting on. The problem is, they are spouting everywhere to anyone who will listen, all righteous indignation and claiming they don't know what they did wrong. The school however need to respect confidentiality, and can't share emails and other info because of GDPR. I'd love to see their file on this, I'm sure it would be enlightening.

If they were abusive then changes would have been brought up

Possibly but not necessarily, @Crazyworldmum
Charging isn't the only option available to the police, and while there's no way of knowing it's possible the "quiet word" was selected instead in the hope that - along with the arrest - it would shut down any further problems

I’m so sorry this happened to you. It’s not uncommon at all unfortunately. Schools reporting parents to the Local Authority because them refusing them the support they need to attend, surprise surprise, means they can’t attend. Rather than providing the legally required support they try to get the Local Authority to prosecute the parent for not sending a child to school that the school has made too unwell to attend. If that doesn’t work their next port of call is often a malicious report to social services, wasting the time of social workers who have genuinely vulnerable children to see. Social workers do not take kindly to this, as you noted. It is disgraceful and social workers are also aware or this pattern of behaviour and the specific schools that often do this, run by appalling Head Teachers who should be nowhere near children. It’s all part of their playbook of tactics to try to bully families of children with SEND out of their schools to save money and being furious when those disabled children’s parents stand up to them and try to enforce their children’s legal rights. This pretence that the parents are “vexatious” or unreasonable for having to contact the school repeatedly about their law breaking is the worst kind of gaslighting and sadly, as you can see from this thread, many people are so naive that they actually believe such nonsense, even teachers, many of whom must have seen this happen in the schools where they work because it is so common, or at least have ex-colleagues who do even if their own school doesn’t behave like this. I can understand the naivety from some parents but from teachers, it’s hard to fathom. I agree with you completely that it’s insulting that the parents of disabled children who are forced to fight this appalling system and these immoral and irresponsible, unprofessional people just to get them to do the minimum legal requirements of their jobs and bullied like this and have aspersions cast on them, are threatened like this with prosecution or worse, and then have to put up with the pretence that they are the unreasonable ones, despite the fact that when these cases do come before courts parents win 98% of them so it’s a very reasonable assumption where SEND is involved that the school is almost certainly in the wrong if there is a dispute with the parents.

I am sure the teachers do have to deal with many unreasonable parents but the parents of children with SEND are usually not those, they are the ones having to navigate the wild west of illegal behaviour that supposedly constitutes an education system, watch their children’s legal rights denied and their children distressed, while trying to do their own full time jobs as well, and then to top it all off be told that they should just let their child’s education be trashed or access to school made impossible at all because repeatedly asking school staff to comply with the law might make them “upset”. Clearly not the slightest thought has been given by the schools to how upset the children involved and their parents might feel.

A decent regulator with severe penalities for non-compliance with law and statute is the only way things will improve.

Nope. Their medical issues were diagnosed at the time of the behaviour and unchanged when the EHCPs were granted. The support at school is meant to be based on need. The schools were required to provide it at the time. The parents had to get EHCPs put in place to force the schools to comply with the law because they had previously refused to do so and tried to bully the parents instead, per my post describing tactics that are almost identical to those the school in the article adopted (minus the police), in an attempt to circumvent the law and pretend it was the parents being unreasonable. It wasn’t, the court agreed in each case, and as the courts agree in 98% of cases about children with SEND that come before them. Given that statistic if there is a dispute between a school and parents of a child with SEND you can be almost certain that the school is in the wrong.

The article contains clear evidence that they were in breach of the Children and Families Act 2014, the statutory SEND Code of Practice 2015 and most likely also GDPR (see my earlier posts). I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim someone is “doing their job” properly if they are breaching multiple laws and regulations that apply to their role.

No seriously, why can't the school and local authority give their side of the story? There is no reason. It is not "sub judice". There are no proceedings pending.

The school and the governors are simply hiding.

They sound like fucking nightmares. No one gets banned from their kid's school if they are behaving in a reasonable way.

Then by the same token, we don't know if it wasn't slanderous if we don't know exactly what was said and whether it was true or not.

However I was talking in a general sense about whatsapp conversations in general, as was the poster I was replying to, if you read our comments.

On face value it certainly does seem OTT but I have a feeling there is more to it than we are being told.

I think gossipy whatsapp groups are awful anyway and it is not right to make disparaging remarks about people so publicly.

We don't know what these parents are like and without actually seeing them and hearing them speak, we cannot really judge the situation.

It's just generally not the done thing. When you get, for example, patients slagging off specifc named NHS services on social media, the service doesn't reply, even if what the patient is claiming is a load of tosh.

So no, I don't think anyone is "hiding". It just isn't what state organisations do.

Schools do not have any legal jurisdiction over people’s private communications in whatsapp messages. It is not for a school to dictate when or if a parent should raise a formal complaint (and in this case it sounds as though they did that also but, as is often the case, the school’s complaints policy was ineffective). Regardless, people are free (and indeed, must be free) to scrutinise and criticise public organisations and communicate with each other privately if they so choose. Schools may want to think they have a right to prevent parents sharing information or dissatisfaction or issues between them but they don’t, any more than they would have a right to prevent such a discussion in someone’s home or a café. If the content was libellous they could raise a legal case for libel against the parents. Unsurprisingly they have not done so. Perhaps teachers should focus more energy on improving the quality of education and then parents would be less likely to make negative comments about schools. But sadly for the authoritarian who clearly walk among us this is not a dictatorship and even if certain Heads try to treat a school as their own little Kingdom, they do not have the authority to tell other adults what they can discuss, when, how and with whom.

Not necessarily true: see my previous posts.

You are missing the words "In my opinion".

Who is Maxie?!