Truth and lies

Cotham School has published another ‘update‘ about Stoke Lodge, apparently in response to a recent article in Bristol24/7 about its decision to stop hiring the pitches and the pavilion to local sports clubs (see ‘Cotham School prevents football clubs from using Stoke Lodge‘). That decision has been very disruptive to clubs mid-season, and has left one club looking urgently for a new home ground. But most of the ‘update’ isn’t about that – it has been used as an opportunity to recite and/or rewrite history and to express more pointless hostility to the Stoke Lodge community.

Dealing with club use of the pitches first, the clubs are able to deal with mowing and white-lining themselves, but it is beyond strange for the school to claim that it is reducing its costs by refusing to hire out the pavilion because it had set the hire fees too low. Surely there is a more obvious and less hostile solution? Bristols Boys FC have offered to pay more for pavilion hire so that it was cost-neutral to the school, so this doesn’t make sense at all.  The school has to maintain the pavilion anyway – it has to keep the power on etc, so the marginal cost of hiring it to a club that urgently needs it and can’t play without it, is likely to be minimal (to say nothing of being the right thing to do).

What else is in the ‘update’? It retells the story of the last few years (not always accurately – for example the TVG application was made well before the school arranged to put the fence up; the school did that knowing it would have to be taken down if the land was registered). But paragraph 2 is more concerning:

Remember that the school negotiated a lease of land that was subject to ongoing community access, as it had always been (and received valuable financial benefits as a result of that ongoing access). It says that it then decided that ongoing public access was ‘problematic’ and a safeguarding concern – even though many other schools operate in the same context every day. It lists some ‘fear factors’ including ‘dogs and strangers in the changing rooms’ – but we checked several years ago and the school has never recorded any incidents of this happening. All risk assessment experts say that risks from dogs and the public can be managed in other ways (again, just like other schools do).

As for the complaint that there was a ‘general atmosphere’ that pupils and teachers were made to feel unwelcome – how ridiculous! The school only resumed use in 2019 after the fence was put up, so this is apparently a complaint that they were made to feel unwelcome by the people they had fenced out and excluded from the playing fields – the people on the other side of the fence. In itself that’s a bold and unproven claim, but it also dismisses all the occasions when there were friendly interactions (when balls were returned over the fence, or when valuable PE equipment left behind on the field was kept safe for the school) or when pupils who were locked out and wandering the streets were shown how to get into the field, or when pupils were locked in and in danger of being left behind by the coaches but were helped by locals to rejoin their classmates. And of course on by far the majority of occasions it was business as usual with no contact or hostility on either side. Cotham’s false claims do nothing to improve relations between the school and the community. We put up with a lot of this nonsense when Cotham School allowed the Twitter troll account ‘Justice4Cotham’ free rein; we don’t accept it coming from the school on its own headed notepaper.

But moving on – yes, the land has now been registered, and registration has legal consequences. It doesn’t matter that the school repeatedly claims that it intends to take legal action. Talk is cheap but legal action is very expensive. The last time a section 14 claim went to court, it cost the claimant hundreds of thousands of pounds and took 7 years through all its appeal stages (the claimant being unsuccessful each time). This is a school that is now on public record as expecting to be operating at a loss within 2 years, and is reliant on its reserves to get by. The extract below is from the school’s FPGP committee minutes for March 2023.

Is the Headteacher really telling parents that she thinks high cost litigation with a limited chance of success is the best use of their dwindling reserves? Even though it brings closer the day they run out of money and out of options? And does the Head really want to step up to the witness stand to be cross-examined on why she told the previous public inquiry that Ofsted required a fence, when Ofsted confirms it does not? The school’s case has never been supported by any evidence at all – they relied on asking the TVG Inspector not to look at ours, and to some extent that’s what they got; but they can’t rely on that happening in court.

Crucially, paragraph 8 amounts to an admission that the fence IS in fact on the TVG (despite the obviously false claim Cotham previously published in a letter from their solicitors). This paragraph also amounts to a statement that although Cotham realises its fence is unlawful, the school doesn’t fancy complying with the law and thinks it should be allowed to do so at a time of its own choosing. That’s not how the criminal law works. And who believes that Cotham would ‘ultimately’ remove the fence, given the school’s track record of hostility and false claims?  

Turning to the school’s parting shots in paragraph 12: so far as we are aware, the only fence panels that have been ‘removed’ from the site are the ones that were crushed by a falling branch (these were taken away by BCC on health and safety grounds because the school failed to deal with the issue). All the other panels are very visibly still there. And the football nets were still in use up to the point when Cotham’s contractors came to remove the goalposts at the end of October. The only area of the nets that was cut was where a fox got tangled up and nearly died two years ago and nobody is apologising for rescuing the fox from nets that should not have been left down. 

We call on Cotham School to stop making false claims and stoking division with the community. We have made generous offers to work with the school and to make accommodations for its concerns about playing sport on public access land. But it will never be true for Cotham School to say it can’t use Stoke Lodge and the day may come when it has no option but to return, so the Head’s apparent policy of ongoing active hostility to the community is really not in Cotham’s longer-term best interests.