Cotham’s mis-information statements (2)

To complete our fact-check of the most prominent examples of misinformation published by Cotham School in the last week, we turn to a Public Forum statement submitted by the school’s Director of Finance and Resources, Allison Crossland, for the Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting on 23 October (pages 101-102 on this link).

Ms Crossland got off to a bold start with:

As set out in our previous post, no it didn’t. It did not say Stoke Lodge was Cotham’s private property (it is Council-owned) and it did not make any change to the terms of the lease (which makes the school’s use ‘subject to all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’). But it did explicitly say that the school’s use is subject to any existing rights of way, whether or not they are recorded on the Definitive Map. Oh, also – as covered yesterday, Cotham School doesn’t have 1650+ students for whom it provides PE at Stoke Lodge.

It is not possible to say with any honesty that ‘this legal status is fundamentally incompatible with public rights of way’ because the law recognises that schools can have public rights of way and many schools in Bristol and across the UK do have them – even across actual private school playing fields like those of Harrow School! These claims are obviously false and the school should stop making them.

Ms Crossland goes on to provide a list of reasons why she thinks ‘this legal status’ (that doesn’t actually exist) is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ with public rights of way.

First she says that public rights of way would ‘create permanent legal rights that directly contradict the Court’s findings’. As above, please read paragraph 308 of the judgment. There is no contradiction because that wasn’t the Court’s finding.

A little later on she says:

The use of speech marks there is interesting. It’s designed to suggest that this was something the Court actually said. But the Court didn’t say any such thing. Search the judgment as hard as you like and you will not find that phrase. So speech marks should not have been used in what looks like an attempt to give this misleading claim some gravitas.

At the same meeting Sandra Fryer tried a different version of the same claim, saying that ‘the judge said we can use [these playing fields] as we require’. No, he didn’t. And actually the Department for Education is clear that academies ‘do not have statutory control over use of their premises… To determine their powers around control over the use of their premises, trusts must refer to the terms on which academies occupy their site’. Yes, it’s back to that pesky lease again.

Would public rights of way prevent exclusive operational control as Ms Crossland claimed? And is that necessary for educational activities? Other schools with public rights of way across their land (or that use pitches in public parks) don’t seem to think so. Remember, as Jo Butler admitted on the witness stand, there is no requirement by either the Department for Education or Ofsted for security fencing. And even if Cotham wants a fence for reasons of its own, the reasonable and rational approach would have been to fence a smaller area so that the rights of way fell outside, rather than inside it – but apparently that was not enough land to satisfy Cotham’s ambitions for Stoke Lodge (see the word ‘development’ creeping in below).

Moving on, this is a good one: under the heading ‘Permanence and precedent’ Ms Crossland says:

Finally something we can agree on! It’s not easy to either extinguish or divert public rights of way. That is true. We’re in a queue for the Planning Inspectorate at the moment to complete the process of adding these routes to the Definitive Map, but Cotham School needs to reckon with a future in which those rights of way will be walked by the public – across, not around the outside of, the field.

Would ‘agreeing to them’ (which the Council has already done) ‘set a precedent requiring private educational facilities to accommodate public access’? Hardly! The point about public rights of way is that acquiring them takes 20 years of open, unchallenged use. An expert inspector has already reviewed the evidence and said that these rights accrued many years ago. And once a highway, always a highway.

Many other schools have public rights of way across their land. Not many schools treat members of the public the way that Cotham School does, because what sort of example would that set for students?

‘Cotham values’ are:

achievement – diversity – respect

and while we respect their right to do PE at Stoke Lodge, we see precious little respect from Cotham for the shared use terms of their lease or for thousands of local residents, or even for the law that says it is a criminal offence to obstruct public rights of way.

Remember, Sandra Fryer herself said back in 2014 about the idea of fencing the land:

The enormous difficulty for Cotham of imposing this all-encompassing, community-excluding, PROW-denying, disability-discriminatory perimeter fence on the public and deliberately refusing to recognise our presence on the land – that’s something else we can agree on.