Cotham’s mis-information statement (1)

This post might be slightly dry, but it will be honest and factual. It’s also necessary, because a remarkable amount of misinformation has been published by Cotham School and its staff in recent days.

First, let’s look at the ‘information statement‘ published by Cotham School on 22 October. It starts off by saying that:

In fact, this was not part of the High Court’s decision – no-one disputed that the land is held by the Council for the purposes of education, but that says nothing about public access or the terms of the lease. The arboretum area at Stoke Lodge is also education land. So is the House and surroundings. So is the area on which the Council has built a much-loved public play park. All of it is held for the purpose of education, but that doesn’t take the argument about public access any further. Conversely, a number of schools do PE on public recreation land – for example, Fairfield High School which has a 100+ year licence to do PE at Muller Road Recreation Ground (which is open to the public and off-lead dogs). 

And it is not solely ‘for the school to determine how it uses the playing fields’ – that might have been the case when Cotham was a maintained school (but during that period of 11 years it made no effort whatsoever to stop people using the land, but acknowledged repeatedly in contractual arrangements that the land was open to the public and dogs). The Department for Education is clear that academy schools, on the other hand, hold land subject to the terms of their lease. And as we all know by now, Cotham’s lease to do PE at Stoke Lodge is ‘subject to all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’.

Moving on from the seriously misleading claims in the very first sentence, the school goes on to say:

This is just nonsense. The High Court decision was about village green status, and only that. It did not ‘conclusively determine that public rights of access could not arise’ – in fact, the judge specifically noted that the school’s lease is subject to any existing rights of way, whether or not they are recorded. End of.

Cotham’s Chair of Governors and Business Manager were firmly reminded by Councillor Tim Kent at a Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting this week that the Council supports the existence of the rights of way and that they came into existence well before any signs were put up. Those public rights of way are a real issue for Cotham, and while Sandra Fryer said they “do not exist in our mind”, that has never been the relevant legal test.

Then we have a carefully-worded statement that ‘We have considered in detail the extent of playing fields required for a school with nearly 1700 students’. While that may be an interesting conceptual analysis, Cotham School’s published admission number is 1,215 students, not 1,700. It seems to be counting in students at the North Bristol Post-16 Centre which is a separate educational establishment, but it does not provide PE lessons for them (and due to rapidly falling pupil numbers Cotham School may not have 1,215 actual students in any case). More on the dodgy maths that has been used by the school for years to perpetuate its claims here.

Next, the school claims to have ‘improved safety by removing muddy paths’ by blocking off two perimeter walkways altogether (Malcolm Tucker would be proud) and also claims that this responds to the concerns previously raised by Bristol Tree Forum – BTF have responded separately to that claim here.

There’s a comment about a ‘permissive perimeter walk’, but the judge in the High Court ruled that community use under the lease is not ‘by permission’ as claimed by the school. That finding is as binding on Cotham as the court’s finding that the land is not a village green. They are going to have to learn to live with that. Just because they keep calling it permissive doesn’t make it so. In fact, those who attended the trial will recall a comedy moment when one of the school’s witnesses had to do a u-turn on the stand about this. He had repeatedly described community use as permissive and it was pointed out to him that this wasn’t the argument the school was making – so then he said (on oath) that he had made a mistake and use was in fact ‘not permissive’.

We won’t go through every other issue in the statement, but Cotham School closes by suggesting that there have been ‘inaccurate or offensive communications, comments and accusations levelled at the school’. If they mean this blog, it will be clear to readers that we are all about making documentary evidence and links available for you to verify what we’re saying. We care about accuracy and honesty. The whole point of this post has been to correct inaccurate communications by the school. If Cotham wants the community not to complain about their misleading statements, then its staff and governors should stop making misleading statements.