Fathoming Cotham’s latest announcement

Cotham School announced last week that it will ‘temporarily halt’ using Stoke Lodge while it seeks redress for the ‘unfathomable decision’ to register Stoke Lodge as a village green.

The PROWG Committee’s decision was, of course, not unfathomable at all. The decision was one for the Committee to take and the Inspector had made it clear that the Committee might disagree with him on key issues of fact, like whether there were enough signs on the land to make use not ‘as of right’ – and that’s what they did. It’s actually a very simple issue and not unfathomable at all.

Let’s also remember that Cotham took its lease of Stoke Lodge knowing that a TVG application was ongoing, and agreed to a special term that school use was subject to ongoing community use. So unfettered public access shouldn’t be a surprise or indeed a problem for the school – it’s what they signed up for. But it’s understandable, having claimed for so long that TVG status would be a problem, that they want to conduct themselves as though it is.

It was actually the view of Cotham’s own PE staff as far back as 2014 that they could and should do all PE on the school’s main site, using the facilities they now have, and only use Stoke Lodge for extra-curricular activities and matches (to read more about this, click here):

So, what about Cotham’s recent decision to use other facilities at Golden Hill for this academic year? In many ways it’s very pragmatic:

• Golden Hill is much closer to Cotham School, reducing the lesson time wasted on coach travel, potentially reducing coach costs and environmental impact and increasing the time pupils spend actually doing PE.
• Golden Hill was identified as far back as 2014 by the previous headteacher as a suitable alternative site and it will look much better from an educational point of view in the event of an Ofsted inspection (Ofsted has previously criticised the amount of teaching time lost to travel – see the link above).
• Cotham already had an ongoing partnership with Shine.
• Cotham remains the leaseholder of Stoke Lodge and gains income from sessional lettings. Previously it paid the University to maintain the land and also allowed it keep the lettings income – now the school pays less for mowing and white-lining and gets money coming in from clubs and other hirers. A much better deal than before!
• Stoke Lodge remains available to Cotham for extra-curricular activities and matches, as the PE department wanted.

But it’s important to say that this is a choice by Cotham, not something they have been forced to do. Talking about public access to Stoke Lodge Village Green, the headteacher says ‘We deem this to present an unacceptable level of risk to our students and staff’. How did they reach that conclusion? Other schools provide PE on shared access sites – did Cotham ask them for tips on how they manage that? We can tell you that Cotham never made any approach to the community around Stoke Lodge to discuss any mitigations for their perceived risks, even though we have been offering to discuss this for over five years! WLSL proactively offered various commitments this summer to ease the school’s concerns, but these were not acknowledged.

There’s nothing about TVG status that means Stoke Lodge ceases to be ‘suitable outdoor space for physical education’ as required by the school standards regulations. Ofsted never required a fence! If the school chooses not to use Stoke Lodge, that’s entirely up to them of course – and we understand why they want to present it this way. But it seems ridiculous to think that the school would even consider spending tens of thousands of pounds trying to challenge registration when it has workable alternative options. We have seen many ridiculous things come to pass at Stoke Lodge, but we hope that times (and governors?) are a-changin’…