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

The thing is, Borehamwood is not a tiny, isolated place. There are other schools within walking distance. Why keep your child in a school that won’t let you on the premises?

Follow the school complaints procedure.

I'm not sure why the couple in the article had such a problem with the deputy head being appointed acting headteacher while a recruitment process was ongoing. That's just normal and tbh if they kept banging on about it to the school, what was the school supposed to say?

It terrifies me how happy people are to live in a police state.

The parents were already banned from the grounds and not attending. Sending too many emails is not a bloody crime. The average SEND parent practically needs their own admin staff to get anything for their children, and yes, that frequently means many many emails. We don't do it for our entertainment. They may well be total pain in the arse, but last I checked it's not a crime and it shouldn't be.

If people talk about school in a small parent what'sapp group that's private I disagree with naming and shaming on platforms like Facebook. but what 5-10 people talk about privately isn't anybody's business.

No, the pp is talking about an MP who was kicked out of Labour for assaulting someone.

The person in the article is a Lib Dem councillor who has not been kicked out of the party and there is no evidence that he has assaulted anyone.

Personally I find it shocking that this has occurred and that the poor child involved has been forced to move schools.

If the police or school had any evidence of harassment the case wouldn’t not have been dropped. It’s Kafkaesque to be arrested and not even told what you are meant to have done wrong.

Contrary to many comments on this thread, there is no evidence of harassment. It appears there were private comments in private whatsapp and facebook groups over which the school has no jurisdiction, any more than they can control what people say during a conversation in their home or a café. These aren’t public communications.

Then there were 45 emails to the school over a six month period. Given their child had epilepsy and other disabilities and the school had prohibited any other form of communication that doesn’t seem excessive. In many cases if a child has medical conditions contact between school and home even on a daily basis is required, and often mandated by EHCPs so is no indicator of harassment without any information on the content and purpose of those emails. Furthermore, it sounds like the school itself had caused the volume of email to be so large by preventing any other form of communication between the child’s parent and teachers, not even

Meanwhile, banning parents from the premises when there is no evidence of verbal abuse or physical aggression to staff is unacceptable. That must have made the little girl feel very uncomfortable and distressed, that she had to be collected from the school gate. They even prevented parent teacher meetings taking place which for a child with disabilities is a breach of the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND Code of Practice 2015. Banning her parents from even watching her school play is vindictive and shows that the staff were not reasonable. The impact on the child doesn’t seem to have been considered anywhere in this.

Sadly, I have seen similar behaviour in action from unscrupulous Head Teachers, trying to drive children with medical conditions/ disabilities out of their schools to save money on provision. They demonise the parents, treat them and their children appallingly, try to silence them from telling others what is happening, trying to police private communications outside school jurisdiction and prevent parents seeking support from others and trying to implement illegal policies to override legislation, for example telling parents who are also staff of Governors that they must report any negative comments about the school that were part of private conversations, without permission to use this personal data for organisational purposes.

It’s very telling that the school’s ultimate aim was clearly for the child to leave the school and that is what the police “recommended”, so clearly what the school had asked for as police are hardly experts in educational provision. The school seems to have tried to make the situation so unworkable that the parents would have no choice but to move their child and cause her all of that disruption.

Given the case was dropped and the school and police have declined to provide any account of their behaviour (which would have avoided the reputational damage of this being publicised) it seems highly unlikely they had any sufficient justification for their behaviour to this child and her parents, and more likely simply a case of them trying to bully a family into silence for expressing anything other than positive views about the school.

Education is the wild west and schools and Local Authorities ignore legislation and statutory regulations with impunity. OFSTED needs replacing with a proper regulator which will enforce education law, rather than leaving it to individual parents to do so, and levy significant fines of Local Authorities and schools who break it, alongside stripping professional qualifications from the staff involved and barring them from work in the sector, in line with how effective regulators in other sectors work.

It was a private Facebook group too, according to the article.

I confess I know nothing about Facebook, but I don’t really see how that’s any different to texts between a group of friends, or discussion over coffee or in the pub.

This is one side of the story. If their account is accurate (which I will not be surprised if it isn't) then it is absolute overkill and inappropriate.

In my experience schools and teachers don't like any control being taken away from them. If someone credibly queries them in a way they don't like, I wouldn't die of shock if they reacted disproportionately. But also i'd love to hear and see the schools evidence for the reaction as I expect there's more to it.

Ultimately the second they were banned from school premesis they should have removed their child and gone elsewhere. The relationship and trust is gone at that point.

Moving a Neurodiverse child isn't easy on the child, at all. And it's not always that easy anyway to find a school that has available space and can meet needs for medical issues. Join the average SEND FB group if you want to be upset about something. There's a lack of resources for our children (despite what the government thinks about the disabled) and we have to beg for every scrap

Contrary to many comments on this thread, there is no evidence of harassment.

Except for the school saying that there was harassment, school staff being upset to the point of the couple being banned from the school site and the police being consulted?

Do you think that happened for no reason?

I’d love to see the content of these ‘complaints’.

Their examples of "harassment" sound very much like "annoying, won't go away parents who email too much and won't accept what we've told them".

Women who are being stalked don't get 6 police to their rescue.

Managing conflict is a part of any job involving the public. It can be upsetting. We don’t have a right not to be upset at work.

They seem to have investigate for 5 or 6 weeks so there must have been some inital grounds for harrisment concerns. So definetly agree parents didn't handle the situation well.

However I do have some sympathy around medical issues and medication and schools.

My experiences around asthma blue inhailors and poor producures and complete lack of concern about potentially life threatening condition and often being dismissed as overly concerned was staggering. I've seen other posters talk about epipen training that gets teahcers to run to where school keeps pens - often to find it takes too long.

It was a huge relief when asthmatic child hit secondary and could carry own bag and just have inhailor in and ignore school procticold which put inhailors in reception behind locked doors kids couldn't get through.

Though having said that if school was so terrible why didn't they look at moving to another rather than send abusive e-mails and make public disparing comments.

No, I think it happened because there was some kind of grudge match between the acting head and the ex governor, and they both let it escalate.

However I think the school as an institution should not have let it escalate to that point.

@noblegiraffe
what ignorant nonsense, you think because they’re a local councillor they’re not a difficult parent?

At my school the parents that push our poor teachers to breaking point (day in day out) are a police officer and very well respected cardiac surgeon.

I’m glad that the police took this seriously, long overdue

Women have been arrested making gender critical comments on Twitter that the police don't like. As a society we need to start pushing back, unless you'll be happy for a parent to get you arrested because they don't like what you've got to say on parents day. This is an abuse of police powers and the school are embarrassing themselves.

Or why behave in such a way that you get banned from the premises?

Other places definitely have procedures to protect staff from harassment. Why shouldn't schools?

Being rude or being a “nasty piece of work” are not a crime?! What the fuck. You shouldn’t be arrested for that specially since it’s entirely subjective.

Sending too many emails is not a bloody crime.

Sending repeated harassing messages through an electronic system is an offence in the UK, though. And unless you want to go down the US "absolute free speech" route - which also has limitations - there need to be some restrictions on what you can do and say. If you've never been on the receiving end of someone with the "right" level of psychosis - enough to make them a total arsehole, but not enough to stop them being able to operate technology - it can be extremely distressing.

In a previous job I was responsible for the incoming phone service at an organisation with a prominent political profile. In the early 2000s, when it became possible to make landline phone calls more or less for free, we had to deal with a lot of harassment. We had one unhinged bloke from another country calling 20 or 30 times per hour, every day, for several months, until the company that made our telephone exchange managed to work out a way to block the calls (which wasn't really a thing back then in landline-world). The poor operators would pick up and get less than halfway through saying "Hello, XYZ organisation, how can I help?" before he started swearing at them and demanding to talk to the head of the organisation about some grievance or other. I was tasked with organising some training for them, which was quite interesting, because every company I asked said "Oh, right, so you want your operators to be able to handle these calls better?", and I replied "No, I want them to not feel bad about hanging up on the guy, because they are very proud of always putting a call through but they just can't cope with this".

No, I didn't say that because they were a Lib Dem councillor they couldn't be a difficult parent, clearly they are.

I said that given they are a Lib Dem councillor it seemed unlikely that they had previous form for being violent and threatening to the police which would have necessitated six police officers being sent to their house instead of one or two.

Schools will ban family members from the school site if they have been repeatedly abusive and verbally aggressive towards staff. They don’t ban parents for being annoying and making a bit too much of a fuss about their child. They’d have to ban a lot of parents if that was the case!

It’s interesting that the article doesn’t say why they were banned. I expect it wouldn’t have helped this pair’s attempt to claim victim status.

Good to see the tables were turned. The absolute entitlement of a lot of parents these days is staggering, and it’s undoubtedly going to result in a new generation of equally absurd, entitled and dysfunctional princes and princesses. Kids with parents like this are going to find life impossible to negotiate successfully, especially when it dawns on them they are not the ‘main character’ they’ve been led to believe they are by their equally spoilt parents. Having just read a post by a parent ‘giving in’ and buying her six-year-olds iPads (and then being confused by the result) I think we might be there already.

I think there should be policies in place to protect people from harassment. But I don’t think the police should be involved unless a criminal threshold is reached, which in this case it wasn’t.