Doing the sums…

One question we’re often asked is “How much is Cotham spending on fighting the TVG?”

It’s a reasonable question – and one that Cotham School answered in relation to TVG1, confirming on 3 July 2018 in response to an FOI request that:

‘Professional and legal expenses in association with the TVG
application have totalled £100,752.73 and include legal fees,
public inquiry costs and the judicial review.’

That marked the end of the TVG1 process – so what about legal costs for TVG2 and 3? Apparently that’s an extremely difficult question to answer. In fact, a recent decision by the Information Commissioner sets out at some length just how complicated the school has claimed it would be to work out how much they have spent, including a number of different processes that would ultimately require ‘a total of 31 hours 24 minutes to determine whether it holds the information, locate, retrieve and extract the information requested’.

Due to that time estimate, the school refused the request as manifestly unreasonable and, based on their submissions, the Information Commissioner has upheld that refusal (but ordered the school to provide advice and assistance to help the requester to rephrase their request in a way that would allow the school to provide some information).

The school pointed out to the ICO that ‘the amount spent overall on legal professional services each year is publicly available in the school’s accounts’. That’s true: the numbers for the school’s total legal spend on all matters are:

• year ending August 2021: £103,858
• year ending August 2022: £91,029

So typically, ‘legal and professional’ fees costs (including some TVG-related legal costs) seem to run at around £100k. But in the academic year 2022/23, which included most of the lengthy final TVG2/3 submissions, the amount was £174,576. It might be reasonable to assume that most of the excess was TVG-related in that year, plus additional amounts for submissions made in previous years.

But here’s the thing. If what Cotham School has told the Information Commissioner about how difficult it would be to calculate their legal costs is true, then it means that they would be doing it for the first time. Which means that they have not tracked their legal costs for fighting the TVG from 2018 to 2023 and that no governor or senior leader of the school has ever been told – or has ever asked – how much of the school’s reserves have been spent on the effort to keep Stoke Lodge fenced off. It means that, based on the school’s submissions to the ICO, Cotham’s governors apparently have no idea at all how much has been spent, because if they had been kept informed then it wouldn’t take 31+ hours to find the information. And if anything about this is manifestly unreasonable, surely it would be a failure to monitor how much of the school’s resources are being spent on this. Have the governors really approved a blank cheque, regardless of the consequences?

All this was before the current litigation started, and litigation is where the costs start to add up quickly. The High Court has already ruled that Cotham was not eligible for the type of costs protection it wanted, because that is not available for the claim it is bringing. There is no doubt that the school is about to spend a lot of money on legal fees – more than ever before. So is any governor – or the Department for Education – keeping track of how much? Because remember, Ofsted and the DfE are clear that they don’t require playing fields to be fenced. Plenty of schools in Bristol and elsewhere do PE on public access pitches. And every pound spent on litigation is a pound not spent on education.