Cotham’s claims about needing a fence

Cotham School has, for several years, tried to justify its position by saying that Ofsted requires security fencing to be installed around school sites and playing fields. We proved that this wasn’t true – Ofsted has confirmed repeatedly, to us and in its guidance to schools and inspectors, that this is not the case.

More recently, we noticed Cotham making a new claim, that the Department for Education required perimeter fencing. Here is the school’s claim:

Sounds convincing, right? The school obviously hoped so. Anticipating that it would ask its parent population to object to the TVG on that basis, we thought we would check. And it turns out that this claim is not true for several reasons. Here’s what the Department for Education said about it:

Cotham School has for several years obtained insurance via Zurich, which would mean that it is not in the DfE’s Risk Protection Arrangement, so this guidance wouldn’t apply to it at all. Even if it did, the guidance doesn’t require that all playing fields – or even all school sites – should be fenced. And even if Cotham sincerely believed that it had to comply with this guidance, the final problem is this – the guidance refers to fencing over 2m high. But the Stoke Lodge fencing is less than that because the school’s top priority was avoiding a planning application – it was never a safeguarding issue.

But mainly – Cotham is up to its old tricks. It is asking for support based on a completely false claim. There is no requirement – in law, or from Ofsted or from the Department for Education – that playing fields have to be fenced. And in the real world, that should be good news – it means that when Stoke Lodge is registered as a TVG and the fence comes down, Cotham can carry on using the field as normal. Glad we got that sorted out.