It’s been a busy start to 2025, including the long-awaited court case on our Village Green registration. This post isn’t going to be directly about the court case and the judge’s decision won’t be published for a few months. But one aspect of the case that caught the eye of journalists during the trial was the claim by Sandra Fryer, Cotham’ School’s Chair of Governors, that spending hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on a High Court row over a fence was “worth it”.
You can see the BBC report here. Sandra Fryer is quoted as saying that the fence originally cost about £30,000. The numbers involved with the fence are a whole other story, and you can read more about it here.
Ms Fryer’s key quote is this:
“We estimate that these fields are worth some £20m to the school. Whilst we’re not using this field we have to rent alternative space at a cost of upwards of £50,000 per annum. If you gross that up over the period of the lease, that comes up in excess of £20m so £50,000 plus interest over 110 years.”
We’ve been asked a few questions about this £20m claim and we think it discloses some basic errors from this specialist maths academy.
First, it seems that what Ms Fryer has done to reach the £20m figure is to work out the aggregate of all the annual payments for 110 years, if you take £50k as the starting point and increase it by a percentage per year (say 2%). In maths terms, that is the sum of a geometric series. We don’t know precisely what numbers they used but the total payments based on an annual payment of £50k increasing at 2% per year over 110 years would be around £16.1m.
But, as anyone operating in the real world will realise, you don’t need £20m now in order to pay a total of £20m over 110 years, because of the time value of money. The proper thing to do is to discount that total back to find the present value of the money you would need today to fund that ongoing cash flow over time. And the answer to that is just under £1.5m. Still a chunk of cash, but nothing like the £20m claimed by Ms Fryer.
All of these numbers are ‘unreal’ – no one knows what interest rates will actually be, or what discount rate would be the most accurate to use. But just adding up all the numbers as if you have to have access to the cash now is clearly wrong. It’s a conjuror’s distraction technique – look at the shiny thing over there!
But if we’re talking conceptually, it’s important to remember that this isn’t the whole story. Ms Fryer’s claim is that while Cotham School is not using Stoke Lodge, they have to use alternative facilities (rented from Shine at Golden Hill). But when Cotham School is using Stoke Lodge, it has to pay for maintenance at Stoke Lodge. It’s not doing that at the moment (local clubs have stepped up to do the maintenance themselves in return for use of the pitches – an arrangement that is working really well). So if they’re going to make a claim about how much use of Stoke Lodge is ‘worth’, then they have to net off those costs, calculated on the same basis. We know that in 2017-18 Cotham paid the University of Bristol £25,632.58 for maintenance. We also know that they claim to have obtained maintenance services more cheaply from 2019 onwards (though we haven’t seen proof of that). Let’s be generous and assume it was costing Cotham £20k per year to maintain Stoke Lodge before the Village Green was registered. That cost, increased by 2% per year over 110 years and discounted back to present values, is £585,333.
So the difference now (what Stoke Lodge is ‘worth’ to Cotham) is £1,463,350 – £585,333 = £878,017. The analysis that the court case is ‘worth it’ starts to look more shaky – we know that Cotham School had already spent over £100k on its fight for a fence by July 2018, and it told the Information Commissioner that it had no idea how much it had spent by July 2023 because it wasn’t keeping track and it was too difficult to add it all up. But we also know what the court costs look like and the potential cost risk to the school. Things are beginning to look much more finely balanced.
But there’s more – and this is where the fruit comes in. You can find out online how much it costs to hire the astroturf pitch at Golden Hill. It’s £105 for an hour or £157.50 for 90 minutes. And there are 190 days in a year on which pupils attend school. So if we assumed they were having 2 x 60 minute lessons on every single day of the school year, that would come to £39,900. 2 x 90 minute lessons would come to £59,850. Our guess is that in fact Cotham has block-booked 9am to 1pm on every day of the school year and negotiated a price of £50k+ for having that exclusivity and flexibility of timing of arrival/departure. Fair enough. But they also need to keep it real. There is no astroturf at Stoke Lodge (though it appears to be one of Cotham’s future development ambitions) and use of the field is limited not only by the weather conditions on any given day but by the ground being waterlogged in some seasons. Our observations are that the school typically used Stoke Lodge more like 6-7 times a week than 10 times. And use of the field was typically for 45-50 minutes at a time, because getting on and off coaches and travelling between Cotham and Stoke Lodge takes time. Travel time should be less to Golden Hill, which hopefully means pupils are now getting more actual PE time. If the school was using the astroturf pitch on its main site, they would get even more – and for free!
So the comparison being made is between apples and pears, and what Ms Fryer may really be saying is that providing more and better PE lessons to pupils at Golden Hill, costs more money than if they came back to use Stoke Lodge – which is something they are able to do at any time:
‘The court was told that neither Ofsted, the Department for Education, nor Bristol City Council considered fencing necessary, and that – up and down the country – many schools played sport on shared public fields.’
And the flipside of Ms Fryer’s thinking is that, in order to get the better deal that she perceives Stoke Lodge as providing to the school in the long term, and for the sake of potential pupils 100 years in the future, she is willing (even happy) to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of education (public) funds that was granted for the benefit of pupils who are currently at the school. Parents of today’s pupils may view the situation differently.
But the main thing is this – none of this needed to happen. Ms Fryer herself gave evidence in the TVG1 public inquiry that sharing Stoke Lodge with the community was not a problem up to 2013 when the school ceased use (around the time that it started to claim that shared use was incompatible with its statutory duties). Imagine a parallel universe in which Cotham School had worked with the local community or accepted the various offers made to it over time. The money saved by the school by not going to war with the community would have been worth a LOT in 110 years’ time.
We need to talk about Stoke Lodge 