Category: Cotham School

Shopping Cart Theory

Jan 2nd, 2026

Have you heard of Shopping Cart Theory? Basically, it suggests that a person’s moral character can be judged by whether they return their shopping trolley to the designated area in a supermarket car park. Returning it is objectively right, the appropriate thing to do, and pretty easy. On the other hand, abandoning it is not illegal and no one will punish you for leaving it in an empty space that is marginally more convenient for you.

“The shopping trolley is a great litmus test on whether a person is a good or bad member of society.”

The Shopping Cart Theory poses the question: will you do what is right just because it is the right thing to do? Or will you only do it when forced to under threat of punishment?

Over here at Stoke Lodge Towers we’ve been pondering this. Because you see, obstructing a public right of way is a criminal offence (section 137 of the Highways Act). So it’s not just a shopping trolley issue – UK law expressly says that you must not block or obstruct a public right of way. The offence is punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding 51 weeks or a fine, or both. That is a pretty strong incentive to comply – but even if you don’t think anyone will come after you for it, the law is still the law. Theft and speeding are still offences even if no one punishes you for it – or even if no one knows you did it.

This is the kind of stuff that gets taught in school – mainly in SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural education), which cuts across a number of curriculum areas. Cotham School’s SMSC policy, for example, says:

“Provision for the moral development of pupils includes developing their ability to recognise the difference between right and wrong and to readily apply this understanding in their own lives, and to recognise legal boundaries and, in doing so, respect the civil and criminal law of England.”

That’s great. But when it comes to Stoke Lodge, have we seen this put into practice by Cotham School’s leadership? Past actions include the illegal use of covert surveillance; current conduct includes the installation of three unlawful mobile CCTV compounds (BCC has confirmed that these require planning permission which has never been sought). So does Cotham School recognise legal boundaries and model the respect it talks about for the civil and criminal law of England?

What about the public rights of way – will Cotham respect those, even though they have been told that for the moment, BCC won’t take action against them to remove the fence panels and gates that obstruct them? Because the law is still the law. Will they do the right thing just because it’s the right thing? Or will they claim that they are a special case and allowed to do the wrong thing? BCC’s reluctance to take enforcement action doesn’t change the moral obligation to act properly.

Governors at Cotham School should also be aware that this offence isn’t just committed by ‘the school’. Section 314 of the Highways Act says:

“Where an offence… is committed by a body corporate and it is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the body corporate…, he as well as the body corporate is guilty of that offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.”

So it’s an individual challenge for each of Cotham’s governors to consider. Are you consenting to a criminal offence? Are you neglecting to prevent it? Are you comfortable with that? Or do you want to put on record now that you are not?

Because this isn’t victimless. Choosing to obstruct the rights of way at Stoke Lodge means that many people – particularly those with mobility issues or other impairments – no longer have their safe routes to walk. They are more isolated, less independent. The fence and gates mean that liberty is restricted for all of us, even though Cotham’s actual use of the field is minimal in terms of both area and time. The school could make different choices and still provide PE just as it has been doing at Golden Hill, rather than ignoring the civic rights of others.

Where do you stand on Shopping Cart Theory?
Alternative sites and alternative truth – games with numbers

Dec 30th, 2025

A recent response to a Freedom of Information request shows that even while installing its new fence at Stoke Lodge, Cotham School was talking to Bristol City Council about moving to an alternative site for PE. We first saw this in an email that was sent on the same day in September 2025 that the school started construction work (link here):

It’s a remarkable question to be asking at that time and in those circumstances. That same email included a rather strangely-worded statement:

‘We have carefully checked, the size of the fields at Stoke Lodge are below the BB 103 standards for a school of 1700 students.’

There are a number of issues here – first, the BB 103 standards are guidelines (not requirements) for new-build schools. They expressly recognise that some schools may be on restricted sites and may require off-site provision. The guidelines say nothing whatsoever about the size of that off-site provision. The reality is that plenty of schools have limited or no on- or off-site grass pitches of their own. So it’s not really a relevant comparison at all.

Secondly, Cotham School often quotes large numbers (1,700+) for its student population, but those don’t align with reality. Cotham’s official admission number is 1,215 (243 pupils in each of years 7-11). There was a time when the school was over-subscribed, but not any more. It is currently consulting on reducing its admission number to 240 as it moves to eight form entry rather than nine. And look at what they say on the school website here:

Why ‘all five years’? Students in years 12 and 13 attend the North Bristol Post-16 Centre (NBP16) which is a ‘soft federation’ between Cotham and Redland Green Schools. Cotham School does not provide PE lessons for students at NBP16; PE is a mandatory but non-examined subject for years 7-11.

So simply taking 243 and multiplying by 7 is intentionally misleading in a number of ways. ‘243 x 7’ should be 243 (soon to be 240) x 5. And that matters because of what they go on to do with those numbers.

In the same FOI response we see one of Cotham’s possible plans for Stoke Lodge, sent by Sandra Fryer to John Smith (Exec Director of Growth and Regeneration) and others on or before 26 September 2025:

Here we can also see that Cotham has run the numbers so as to suggest that it needs every bit of Stoke Lodge that it has chosen to include within its new fence line – although interestingly, in this plan residents would have been able to walk a circuit of the field that included the pathway behind the old outbuildings. Just a few weeks later Cotham blocked this off with an additional spur of fencing outside the playing field area (even though they don’t use that bit of land at all) – deliberately choosing to force walkers, children and dogs to take their chances with cars coming off the main road into the car park instead. Anyway, let’s deconstruct the numbers.

First, Cotham have focused in on the guidelines for soft outdoor PE only – even though BB103 says that if there is restricted on-site space, this is the lowest priority type of surface (presumably because pitches can always be hired off-site if required). So even for a new-build school, this is not essential. Based on 1,215 pupils, the guideline suggests 48,525 sqm, not 65,500. From this they deduct the soft outdoor space on Cotham School’s own site, which includes an all-weather pitch which is assessed under BB103 as twice its actual area. Cotham suggests that this is calculated as 6,400 sqm. If correct, that would lead to a guideline figure of 42,125 sqm which is around 10.4 acres. Less than half the area of Stoke Lodge Playing Field. You only get to a higher figure than that by assuming that PE is provided for 400+ pupils who actually attend the NBP16. And trying to claim that a flexible guideline for on-site space at new-build schools is a mandatory requirement for off-site provision for an existing school is an unjustifiable stretch in any case. Even more so, when you consider that typically Cotham has only used about 10% of Stoke Lodge for less than 10% of daylight hours annually.

But it seems that part of the game is that Cotham School doesn’t really want to do PE at Stoke Lodge anyway; it is keen to find an alternative site. And so just three days later Sandra Fryer told John Smith (email here):

6-7 hectares is 15+ acres (not the whole of Stoke Lodge). Using the correct figures would point to just over 10 acres, and even that is in no sense a requirement (or even a relevant number). And note that in this email Sandra Fryer claims that Cotham has 1,650 students not 1,700. It’s hard to keep up, isn’t it.

One other point of interest from that email – Ms Fryer is keen to make some demands of the school’s landlord, BCC:

Let’s just pause a minute and remember that the only reason that BCC pays for tree and boundary maintenance at Stoke Lodge under the lease is that this was agreed in recognition of ongoing community use of the field – ‘all existing rights and use… including use by the community’. BCC doesn’t do this for other academy schools. Putting up a fence to restrict and exclude the community in breach of that deal, and then demanding a service level agreement and more money to be spent by the Council on the trees and walls on site, comes across as pretty entitled. Other schools might want to take note of the ever-increasing demands Cotham School is making of BCC. And both parties need to take a long, hard (and better-informed) look at the lease.
You said, we did…

Dec 1st, 2025

On 26 September 2025, Bristol City Council’s Chief Executive Nick Hibberd wrote to a large number of local residents in response to emails expressing concern that Cotham School had started to reinstall a fence around Stoke Lodge just hours after Councillors had called for a pause and for compromise.

In that letter, Mr Hibberd said that ‘everyone recognises the right of the local community to use the space around the field’. Happy to hear it, but that’s not what the lease says – it says that Cotham School’s right to use (the whole of) Stoke Lodge for PE is ‘subject to all existing rights and use of [the whole of] the Property, including use by the community‘.

And when he went on to say that ‘We understand that the school has set out a hierarchy of use of the fields’ our ears pricked up. Because experience suggests that in Cotham’s opinion, local residents would be way, way at the bottom of that hierarchy – so far down that we don’t exist in their mind. But again, that’s not what the lease says. It’s basic grammar – if your right is ‘subject to’ someone else’s right or use, then you don’t get to dictate, restrict or end that right or use. And that’s what Cotham signed up to in its lease for Stoke Lodge.

So it was with great interest that we read the first draft of the Chief Exec’s email (published in response to an information request). What Nick Hibberd originally proposed to say was:

Spot the difference – it’s the right of the local community not just to use the space around the land (what does that even mean?) but the whole of the land that is not actually being used as a sports pitch, and in a way that is acceptable to all (not unilaterally imposed by Cotham School).

But those words disappeared, to be replaced by the sentence about hierarchy of use – simply because that’s what Cotham School wanted. So it seems that the Council believes that the community has rights to use the land as per the lease but Cotham doesn’t want it to say that, and so the Chief Exec ended up suggesting something contrary to the lease instead. Who’s in charge here, the landlord or the tenant?

Mr Hibberd’s email to residents went on to discuss the public rights of way across Stoke Lodge, saying that ‘Bristol City Council will not take action to protect the rights of way unless and until they have been confirmed by the [Secretary of State]. We have written to the school making it clear that the rights of way will need to be respected if they are confirmed.’

In his draft response, Mr Hibberd continued: ‘In any event, it is our understanding that the school is planning to construct the fencing should the PROW remain, so that it is accessible’.

But Sandra Fryer said “please await our comments” and her mark-up changed this statement about BCC’s understanding to:

‘In any event, it is our understanding that the school has taken this [the public rights of way] into account in the plan for reinstating the fence.’

And that’s the version that got sent to local residents – as directed by Cotham School. That change of wording is interesting. Clearly, the school is aware that with the fence where it is, the PROWs are not properly accessible. In fact the fence itself creates many wider accessibility problems (even with the gates currently open), which have not received any consideration from either the school or the Council.

But here’s the question – Cotham School clearly knows that it is obstructing public rights of way. It chose not to reinstate the fence in a way that means that the PROWs remain freely accessible. In fact it did the opposite, building its fence around them to obstruct them all. So was Nick Hibberd actively misled by the school about this? Did he understand the change that was made by Cotham School and if so why did he accept it? As he says, the Council has written to the school making it clear that the rights of way will need to be respected if they are confirmed. And the Council believes both that the public rights of way exist and that the community should be able to use the land ‘in a way that can be agreed by all sides’.

It seems it’s only Cotham that won’t talk, won’t agree and doesn’t want to respect the public rights of way or the lease – whatever its landlord (and the law) says.
Cotham’s mis-information statements (2)

Oct 27th, 2025

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.
Cotham’s mis-information statement (1)

Oct 26th, 2025

This post might be slightly dry, but it will be honest and factual. It’s also necessary, because a remarkable amount of misinformation has been published by Cotham School and its staff in recent days.

First, let’s look at the ‘information statement‘ published by Cotham School on 22 October. It starts off by saying that:

In fact, this was not part of the High Court’s decision – no-one disputed that the land is held by the Council for the purposes of education, but that says nothing about public access or the terms of the lease. The arboretum area at Stoke Lodge is also education land. So is the House and surroundings. So is the area on which the Council has built a much-loved public play park. All of it is held for the purpose of education, but that doesn’t take the argument about public access any further. Conversely, a number of schools do PE on public recreation land – for example, Fairfield High School which has a 100+ year licence to do PE at Muller Road Recreation Ground (which is open to the public and off-lead dogs).

And it is not solely ‘for the school to determine how it uses the playing fields’ – that might have been the case when Cotham was a maintained school (but during that period of 11 years it made no effort whatsoever to stop people using the land, but acknowledged repeatedly in contractual arrangements that the land was open to the public and dogs). The Department for Education is clear that academy schools, on the other hand, hold land subject to the terms of their lease. And as we all know by now, Cotham’s lease to do PE at Stoke Lodge is ‘subject to all existing rights and use of the Property, including use by the community’.

Moving on from the seriously misleading claims in the very first sentence, the school goes on to say:

This is just nonsense. The High Court decision was about village green status, and only that. It did not ‘conclusively determine that public rights of access could not arise’ – in fact, the judge specifically noted that the school’s lease is subject to any existing rights of way, whether or not they are recorded. End of.

Cotham’s Chair of Governors and Business Manager were firmly reminded by Councillor Tim Kent at a Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee meeting this week that the Council supports the existence of the rights of way and that they came into existence well before any signs were put up. Those public rights of way are a real issue for Cotham, and while Sandra Fryer said they “do not exist in our mind”, that has never been the relevant legal test.

Then we have a carefully-worded statement that ‘We have considered in detail the extent of playing fields required for a school with nearly 1700 students’. While that may be an interesting conceptual analysis, Cotham School’s published admission number is 1,215 students, not 1,700. It seems to be counting in students at the North Bristol Post-16 Centre which is a separate educational establishment, but it does not provide PE lessons for them (and due to rapidly falling pupil numbers Cotham School may not have 1,215 actual students in any case). More on the dodgy maths that has been used by the school for years to perpetuate its claims here.

Next, the school claims to have ‘improved safety by removing muddy paths’ by blocking off two perimeter walkways altogether (Malcolm Tucker would be proud) and also claims that this responds to the concerns previously raised by Bristol Tree Forum – BTF have responded separately to that claim here.

There’s a comment about a ‘permissive perimeter walk’, but the judge in the High Court ruled that community use under the lease is not ‘by permission’ as claimed by the school. That finding is as binding on Cotham as the court’s finding that the land is not a village green. They are going to have to learn to live with that. Just because they keep calling it permissive doesn’t make it so. In fact, those who attended the trial will recall a comedy moment when one of the school’s witnesses had to do a u-turn on the stand about this. He had repeatedly described community use as permissive and it was pointed out to him that this wasn’t the argument the school was making – so then he said (on oath) that he had made a mistake and use was in fact ‘not permissive’.

We won’t go through every other issue in the statement, but Cotham School closes by suggesting that there have been ‘inaccurate or offensive communications, comments and accusations levelled at the school’. If they mean this blog, it will be clear to readers that we are all about making documentary evidence and links available for you to verify what we’re saying. We care about accuracy and honesty. The whole point of this post has been to correct inaccurate communications by the school. If Cotham wants the community not to complain about their misleading statements, then its staff and governors should stop making misleading statements.
Categorically, she did

Oct 19th, 2025

This week, We Love Stoke Lodge published a press statement which mentioned that Jo Butler, the Headteacher of Cotham School, had admitted in cross-examination in the High Court that there is no safeguarding requirement for playing fields to be fenced off from the public. Here’s an extract from that press statement:

This seems to have made the school quite cross. It published a statement of its own in response, saying:

‘We must address a significant and misleading misrepresentation in their statement that they persist in claiming. WLSL claim that our headteacher, Jo Butler, has “admitted” there is no safeguarding requirement for fencing, and that this position somehow undermines the legitimacy of necessary safety measures. This is categorically false…
The fencing is not optional; it is a fundamental safeguarding requirement that enables the school to use the land safely and responsibly. This basic principle of child protection should not be controversial.’

The problem for the school is this: Jo Butler did say, on oath, that there was no requirement – from the Department for Education, from Ofsted, or from the Council, for perimeter fencing. Her words were:

“I have never said that Ofsted require schools to erect a perimeter fence.”

Asked again about a letter from Ofsted to a local resident stating that it had never required the school to erect a fence:

she said: “I never said they did”.

Asked whether the Department for Education had ever required the school to put up a fence, she said they had not.

Asked about a Council document which said that fencing is ‘unnecessary in regard to safety, as the school makes use of the site in daylight hours when incidents of trespass without detection would be difficult’, she agreed that that was the Council’s view.

She went on to confirm again in response to questions from her own barrister that there is no general requirement for offsite playing fields to be fenced.

Those of us who were in court took special note of Ms Butler’s statements because it struck us that they were quite different from the impression previously given by the school that Ofsted did have a formal requirement for playing fields to be fenced. You can read more about her previous statements in our post ‘Did she or didn’t she?‘.

But, being under oath – and having highlighted her status an Ofsted inspector – Ms Butler was quite clear. There is no specific safeguarding requirement for fencing. There is really no mystery about this. In the latest edition of the Ofsted inspection handbook, it refers to the official statutory guidance on safeguarding matters, ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education‘, and says, under the heading ‘Safeguarding and security’:

Clearly, children should be kept safe in education, but equally clearly this does not automatically require perimeter fences. As an Ofsted inspector, Jo Butler knows this and as we said before, she very properly said so in court under oath.

For Cotham School to publish a statement saying that ‘The fencing is not optional; it is a fundamental safeguarding requirement‘ puts its headteacher in a tricky position. She knows that is not the case. It is what the school might call a ‘significant and misleading misrepresentation’.

Children can be kept safe by other means than mile-long perimeter fences. Plenty of other schools manage it perfectly well. Plenty of other schools also have public rights of way across their playing fields. Perimeter fences are not a ‘basic principle of child protection’ – at least, not in the view of Ofsted or the Department for Education. There’s no point Cotham trying to spin it any longer. The truth came out in Court. We all get that Cotham School wants a fence, but wanting is not the same as being required to have a fence. We’re just keeping things accurate and honest here.

And we all get that Cotham School wants a fence and has had several risk assessments written to support that objective. But given that it only ever uses about a quarter of the 23 acres of Stoke Lodge, they certainly don’t need a fence around the whole of it, and no competent risk assessor would think that was a good safeguarding solution anyway (we know, we’ve asked one). There is no single spot on the playing field from which you can see the whole of the field, so fencing it as a single area makes no sense from a risk management perspective. From a future development perspective, on the other hand…
Did she or didn’t she?

Aug 3rd, 2025

One of the more dramatic moments of the High Court trial earlier this year was the declaration by Cotham School’s Headteacher, Jo Butler, that she had never said that Ofsted required schools to fence their playing fields. It caused quite a ripple in the courtroom. She confirmed multiple times that she had never said that either Ofsted or the Department for Education required perimeter fencing, whether for schools generally or for Cotham in particular.

It’s surprising, then, that so many people have thought over the years that this is exactly what she, and others at the school, were saying. A local resident wrote to Ofsted in 2018 to check directly with them; Darren Jones MP contacted both Ofsted and the DfE; the local press reported the school’s statement that a fence was ‘the “only reasonable solution” and an Ofsted requirement’.

So did everyone completely misunderstand what the school was saying? Or did everyone think exactly what the school intended them to think? Let’s see what Jo Butler has said over the years, starting with her evidence to the 2016 TVG1 public inquiry.

First, she cited an example of a primary school which she says was judged ‘inadequate’ in 2014 due to the site not being secure – but note that this is about the actual school site and access to the school building, not about playing fields 3 miles away. And shall we look at what that Ofsted report actually said?

That… isn’t about perimeter fencing around playing fields. Nor was it the only reason for the school being judged inadequate – you can look the report up for yourself and see that the school was judged inadequate at the time on every measure (no shade to Bisham School, which is now rated ‘Good’).

Next she referenced Crowstone School at which, again, the security of the school buildings had apparently been found to be unsatisfactory. This was a private prep school with 36 pupils, so possibly not a great comparator (do we hear the sound of a barrel being scraped?). Then she referred to Newmarket Academy, which she said had been placed into special measures in October 2013. We’ve talked more about this school elsewhere, and how the headteacher there worked very collaboratively with the local community. However, what Ms Butler takes from the Newmarket example is this:

The local Newmarket press at the time reported that Ofsted had rated ‘the quality of teaching, behaviour and leadership and management as inadequate’. So putting up a perimeter fence around the main school site (and on-site playing field) was clearly not the action that brought the school out of special measures. But the core message here seems to be: ‘Cotham could be severely downgraded by Ofsted if we don’ t have a fence at Stoke Lodge’. If so, it’s not surprising that people (including, apparently, the Inspector at the time) understood it, in short, as ‘Ofsted requires a fence for safeguarding’.

It wasn’t just at the public inquiry, either – here are minutes from a meeting of Cotham’s Full Governing Body on 5 April 2017:

Now, if you look up either of the relevant Ofsted reports, you can easily see that the problems for each school were not the lack of a perimeter fence around their playing fields. Nor was a ‘requirement’ to ‘more effectively fence their playing fields’ mentioned anywhere in either report. And if you look up the press report mentioned, Ofsted provides a quote:

[Ofsted] said: “Inspectors look at a wide range of evidence when evaluating the effectiveness of safeguarding in schools, and they will not normally find safeguarding to be ineffective because of a single shortcoming, such as site security. We do not have particular expectations about how a school manages issues around site security, although we would expect such risks to be properly considered and managed. “

So the comments noted in governors’ minutes also seem rather misleading, don’t they?

What about communications to parents? In late 2016 the school campaigned for school parents to write letters opposing village green status at Stoke Lodge. Here’s the start of a template letter that was provided (we assume on the Head’s say-so):

And here’s the critical paragraph:

What do we think Cotham School parents were meant to understand and repeat? That Stoke Lodge ‘must’ be fenced off, because ‘this is an Ofsted requirement’? Clearly many did understand it exactly that way, and were probably surprised in 2018 when evidence started coming back from Ofsted that it wasn’t a requirement at all (read more about this here).

But there’s more: here’s an extract from the school’s own notes of a meeting on 21 May 2018 (which were intended to remain confidential):

At this meeting, Jo Butler informed the community members present that:

We don’t know what school she was referring to, but it’s more than clear from Ofsted’s handbook for Inspectors and multiple other Ofsted and DfE guidance that a school would not have been put into special measures because of a lack of fencing around their playing fields, particularly if those playing fields were 3 miles away from the main school site.

As we said two years ago (with remarkable foresight, as it turns out): ‘Claims may have been made by the school during the TVG application process that could not be repeated under oath in court’. And they weren’t repeated. Ms Butler very properly admitted that there is no requirement – from either Ofsted or the Department for Education – for perimeter fencing. But even while she was saying that in court, the school’s website was still designed to give a different impression. The following was published in May 2023 (and remains there at the time of writing):

You can read why this ‘Frequently Asked Question’ is more like a ‘Misleadingly Answered Question’ here – and note that when we asked the DfE about the document referred to by the school, it said:

Cotham School has never corrected the impression, built up over years of careful and not-so-careful wording, that Ofsted requires a fence. Ms Butler may never have said those precise words in that order – but we’ll leave it to everyone to make their own minds up about what the school intended everyone (public, press, parents, pupils) to think.

If perimeter fencing is not a ‘requirement’ (it isn’t), and Ofsted simply requires ‘reasonable and proportionate’ approaches to safeguarding (it does) then there is no ‘need’ or ‘necessity’ for a perimeter fence. Every parent teaches their children the difference between ‘needing’ and ‘wanting’. Cotham School wants a perimeter fence, that’s very clear. But it may not be able to have one at Stoke Lodge because of restrictions in the lease and the law (public rights of way) and other matters. And that’s ok, because as Ms Butler also admitted in court, other schools manage to safeguard pupils effectively on open access playing fields, and there’s no reason why her staff can’t do the same. Or Cotham could fence an area for its own use, within a larger open field in which pitch layouts aren’t impeded by fencing – that’s what they currently hire at Golden Hill, after all. Perhaps despite all the legal turmoil, a compromise is staring everyone in the face!
Costs capping: what really happened

Jul 24th, 2025

Warning: what follows is pretty dry, but it’s important to get accurate facts out there to combat deliberate misinformation.

TLDR: The community did not refuse any costs capping offer – Cotham School deliberately excluded us from its £20k deal with the Council and then argued for the community to bear 90% of the costs of the litigation.

On 15 July the High Court handed down a decision about the allocation of liability for costs, following its ruling that Stoke Lodge should not have been registered as a Village Green.

The general rule in litigation is that the unsuccessful party will be ordered to pay the costs of the successful party (subject to the court’s discretion, taking into account the conduct of the parties, justice and fairness, etc). Normally, where a public authority (here, Bristol City Council) has actively sought to defend a decision (here, to register a new Village Green) and is unsuccessful, the public authority is ordered to pay the successful claimant’s costs. But in this case, Cotham School argued (vindictively in the view of the community) for our representative, Kathy Welham, to be allocated 90% of the costs* and the Council only 10% – and the Court gave Cotham what it wanted. Our community has been landed with a large bill to pay in a short time, as reported here: ‘Stoke Lodge campaigners hit with ‘vindictive’ £90,000 legal bill‘.

We understand that Cotham School representatives have tried to justify this by claiming that Mrs Welham rejected an agreement to cap her potential costs liability, but this is untrue and reflects very poorly on the school. Here are the facts.

In late 2023, Cotham School launched this court action, listing the Council as two defendants: (1) landowner and (2) Commons Registration Authority. The Council as landowner suggested a costs capping agreement among all parties, stating that its proposal was made in recognition of the importance of the community being able to play a full part in proceedings. Cotham School was at the time seeking a costs protection order from the Court (and was also saying how important it thought community participation was). Mrs Welham said she would discuss costs capping once the school’s costs application had been dealt with.

The Council as landowner was struck out as a party to proceedings following a hearing in January 2024, so its proposed agreement fell away. At the same hearing, the school’s application for costs protection was rejected (judicial review-style costs protection is not available for this type of claim). The school said it would appeal that decision, and it had until 15 March 2024 to do so.

Just before the 15 March deadline, the school decided not to appeal the decision on costs protection. This was the point at which Mrs Welham had indicated she would discuss costs capping arrangements. However, one working day later, on Monday 18 March 2024, the school’s solicitors wrote to Mrs Welham taking any costs capping discussions off the table.

A couple of things to note about this – first, it’s clear that the school knew that Mrs Welham thought there would now be a discussion about costs capping, otherwise it would not have paid to have its solicitor send that email. Secondly, Cotham School rejected costs capping discussions, not Mrs Welham. Our understanding is that this was a strategy intended to force the community out of the litigation. However, as noted previously by both the Council and the school (see above), it is very important – and totally normal – in a case like this for the TVG applicant and local community to participate actively in defending their Village Green. And the First Defendant was the Council, which was robustly defending its decision to register Stoke Lodge as a Village Green.

Mrs Welham then became aware that the school had made a fresh approach to an officer at BCC Legal Services (for the Commons Registration Authority/CRA) about making a two-way agreement – correspondence which deliberately excluded Mrs Welham and which has never been disclosed to her despite multiple requests. The rule previously set by the CRA was that correspondence between any of the parties must be copied to all parties – but an officer chose to break that rule and agree to a different form of costs cap limited to the Council and the school (£20k each way), deliberately excluding Mrs Welham. You can watch on this link a video of the April 2024 Public Rights of Way and Greens Committee** at which the community expressed anger during public forum (around 11mins 30 to 14mins 10) that a CRA officer had been liaising with the school behind Mrs Welham’s back. At around 9mins 45 seconds Mrs Welham asks the Committee to confirm that the Council would not sign a consent order on costs capping unless it included all parties. No such consent order was ever put before the Court – the agreement between the Council and the School remains (so far as we know) in undisclosed emails only.

Mrs Welham never rejected any form of costs capping agreement – she simply said that she would wait for the outcome of the school’s legal actions seeking to get costs protection from the court. In the period after the January 2024 hearing, Cotham School never made any approach to Mrs Welham to discuss costs capping, but it did actively seek and reach an agreement with the Council, deliberately excluding Mrs Welham. And then the school chose to refuse any discussions on costs with Mrs Welham.

The school’s repeated misleading statements about the details of the costs capping arrangements do not show it in a good light. It was made clear in court (see BBC report on this link) that instead of making an agreement with Mrs Welham, Cotham School purchased much more expensive ‘after the event’ insurance (although the Finance Officer was unable to remember how much it cost). It would have been cheaper and less hostile for the school to make an arrangement with Mrs Welham, but it chose not to. Due to the high (and unrecoverable) cost of that insurance, the school is unlikely to be much better off having excluded Mrs Welham from costs capping arrangements than if it had behaved fairly and properly.

But costs capping agreements do not determine the allocation of liability by the Court, and the school actively sought to persuade the Court to allocate liability on a 90/10 basis, rather than a 50/50 split between the two defendants or some other ratio. In our view, this highlights again Cotham School’s attitude towards our community. As Kathy Welham has said:

“We, however, are standing by our commitment and obligations, and I would like to emphasise that we hope that the money that is (unjustly, in my personal view) being required of me and my supporters, will be used to help mitigate any detriment to Cotham School pupils flowing from the effects of the school’s multiple legal actions on its reserves of education (public) money.

Finally, we as a community remain incandescently angry that our last accessible, neighbourhood green space, that we love deeply, and which has been relied upon for many decades by the thousands of Bristol citizens who share it with Cotham School, is again in danger of not being protected as it should be. Our commitment to protect the land for future generations is undiminished.”

*These percentages are based on the costs budget set by the Court at an earlier stage, and the total is significantly less than the amount Cotham School has actually spent on litigating this matter: see this BBC report ‘A court in Bristol has heard how a school spent hundreds of thousands of pounds over a fence’.

** This was also the meeting at which Sandra Fryer, Cotham School’s Chair of Governors, and another Cotham School representative attracted press attention for filming members of the community: https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/stoke-lodge-campaigners-filmed/
Local Green Space and little [green] lies

Mar 30th, 2025
Bristol is in the throes of preparing a new Local Plan – this is the strategic plan for development in Bristol for the next 10-15 years. It sets the policies applicable to particular sites that will then guide decisions if planning applications are made. Previously, Stoke Lodge has been protected as ‘Important Open Space’ under the Local Plan. But in the new Plan, the Council wants to use new designations for open space, including ‘Local Green Space’ as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

The NPPF states that the Local Green Space designation should only be used where the green space is:

a) in reasonably close proximity to the community it serves;

b) demonstrably special to a local community and holds a particular local significance, for example because of its beauty, historic significance, recreational value (including as a playing field), tranquillity or richness of its wildlife; and

c) local in character and is not an extensive tract of land.

BCC’s draft Local Plan is currently undergoing a long and detailed examination process headed up by expert planning inspectors, whose job it is to ensure that the Plan is ‘sound’. As part of that, public hearings are being conducted during which individuals/groups can have their objections heard, and on 27 March it was the turn of the Green Infrastructure policies, including GI1 (Local Green Space) and GI2 (Reserved Open Green Space). Both LGS and ROGS are protected open spaces, so what’s the difference?
- LGS is, like greenbelt land, ‘protected from development which would harm the green space’s character, role and appearance’.
- In the case of ROGS: ‘Development on these spaces is generally not allowed, however where a space can be seen to be no
  longer fulfilling its open space function and its loss would not lead to a deficiency of open space, development will be permitted.’
So it’s surprising, isn’t it, that Cotham School turned up to the examination hearings to make a case that Stoke Lodge should not be protected as LGS (playing fields forever) but should instead be designated as ROGS. The only reason for making that objection would be so that potentially, in future, the land might be available for other development – something that Cotham School has always maintained is absolutely the furthest thing from its mind, honestly.

That wasn’t their pitch at the hearing, though. Instead, the Headteacher, Jo Butler, and a property consultant who had written an 11 page submission, claimed that:
- LGS designation could result in the loss of school playing fields. Repeatedly, the Inspector asked “How?” – planning policy designations don’t change the use or function of a site.
- LGS designation would be discriminatory against young people. Again, the Inspector asked “How?” – LGS designation won’t stop Stoke Lodge being used as a playing field.
- Stoke Lodge is the only playing field proposed as LGS in the draft Local Plan – this is simply not true; there are four playing fields with this proposed designation and playing field use is actually contemplated within the definition in the NPPF framework (see above).
- The school wasn’t consulted about the designation… or was it?
We want to clarify this last point. BCC ran a separate consultation about the introduction of new open space policies in 2019. Cotham’s Headteacher Jo Butler said of this consultation that:
- the school wasn’t consulted on the change of use [the Inspector pointed out that it wasn’t a change of use];
- lots of Cotham pupils don’t have access to green space [the Inspector pointed out that LGS designation actually protects green space – that’s the point of it]; and
- she thought the designation had come about because of “pressure from campaigners who somehow knew about this consultation”.
Let’s take a look at what Ms Butler apparently thinks was some kind of cloak and dagger consultation exercise that the school was not let in on. It was actually a public consultation (the consultation document is here) and multiple in-person events were also held. The response document, published in September 2019, lists the respondents. There were 968 individuals and organisations who responded to the consultation, from all over the city. And in relation specifically to whether Stoke Lodge should be designated ROGS or LGS, there were 203 responses. The consultation response also notes that a petition was received for the designation of Stoke Lodge as an area of LGS, signed by 1,574 people.

But what’s this? Respondent no. 489 to the consultation, who commented on the designation for Stoke Lodge, was… Cotham School!

Not only did Cotham School know about the consultation, but it responded to it (and we can only assume that Ms Butler knows what is done in the name of her school). So why did she repeatedly claim that the school had not been consulted? Why did her property consultant say the same, both in his written report and at the hearing? Surely there was no intention to mislead the Inspector? None of Cotham’s objections to the designation of Stoke Lodge hold water, and the claim about not being consulted is obviously and provably untrue.

The key point about the LGS designation is that a site must be ‘demonstrably special to a local community’ and ‘hold particular local significance’. To which we say: show us another site for which the local community has provided evidence to support two court cases, three TVG applications and four public rights of way; for which the community has raised thousands and thousands of pounds to maintain and protect the land and open access to it for all, for ever; for which 1,574 people signed a petition supporting LGS designation. Stoke Lodge is clearly ‘demonstrably special’ – here’s the video we produced at the time:

Designation as LGS doesn’t affect the use of the field as playing fields at all (neither does village green status). It does mean that if Cotham School has ambitions to develop the field for other purposes, it will have to give them up. If it has no such ambitions, then it has no need to object to LGS status. And yet Cotham School’s senior leadership turned out in force last Thursday to make their objections. Let the reader understand.
Maths and fruit

Feb 23rd, 2025

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.