We highlighted a few months ago that, based on Cotham School’s responses to FOI requests and its detailed responses to the Information Commissioner’s Office, it appears that no one at Cotham has any idea how much money it spent on legal fees fighting the TVG2/3 process from late 2018 up to June 2023 (when the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee voted 6:1 that Stoke Lodge should be registered as a village green). You can read more about how we reached that conclusion here. It seems that no governor or senior leader of the school has ever been told – or has ever asked – how much of the school’s reserves were spent on the effort to keep Stoke Lodge fenced off. Apparently there’s just a blank cheque for legal fees and no one is asking questions.
Immediately after the PROWG Committee’s decision in June 2023, the school took steps towards court action to challenge the registration. Court action is expensive, so you would think the governors would be closely involved in decision-making around starting, and continuing, legal action. The thing is, according to the school’s official records, that isn’t the case. The PROWG Committee decided to register the land on 28 June 2023, but at the school’s Full Governing Body meeting on 6 July 2023 (just over a week later) apparently no one mentioned Stoke Lodge at all. At the September meeting the governors decided to stop hiring the pitches to local clubs, and then at the 7 December meeting there is again no mention of Stoke Lodge (even though the school’s second legal action had been launched not long before that meeting). This just seems peculiar – a decision to stop hiring out pitches (which makes the school £6-7k per year) was worth minuting and highlighting in bold – but a decision to launch litigation costing many tens of thousands of pounds and risking far more, is nowhere to be found.
You might wonder if the decision was taken by a sub-committee – but the minutes of the November meeting of the Finance, Premises and General Purposes Committee are also silent on Stoke Lodge matters. That meeting is particularly interesting because it was attended by the auditor who was preparing the school’s annual accounts. Governors were asked whether they were aware of ‘any legal claims, either ongoing or anticipated’ and they said ‘No’.
You might assume that governors are being given information in some other form – in special briefings outside of governor meetings, perhaps, or in verbal updates. But according to the school’s response to another recent FOI request that’s not the case:
The fact is that, as far as the school’s own records show, Cotham School’s governing body has astonishingly little involvement in, knowledge of or control over the decision-making process around its Stoke Lodge litigation. There is no evidence of a decision by the governors that they want the school to spend its reserves on litigation rather than education. Governors may have asked for information in more recent meetings, but no minutes of full governing body meetings have been published since December 2023.
So – are the governors being kept in the dark? Do they know how much money was spent on the TVG process up to June 2023? Do they know how much is being spent on the litigation now, how much more is at risk for the school and how that will impact on Cotham students? Have governors been allowed to consider the alternatives? If they are not taking these critical financial decisions as a governing body, who is?
If you see a Cotham governor out and about, why not ask them yourself?
We need to talk about Stoke Lodge 