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.