The parents of a nine-year-old girl were arrested by police after they complained about their daughter’s primary school in a WhatsApp group.
Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were reportedly detained in front of their young daughter by six officers before being left in a cell for eight hours.
They said they were questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
After a five-week investigation, police concluded that there should be no further action.
‘Disparaging’ comments
It comes after officers from Essex Police turned up at the home of Allison Pearson, the Telegraph columnist, on Remembrance Sunday to inform her that she was being investigated on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred over a post she had published and then deleted on social media 12 months earlier.
The arrest of the couple, on Jan 29, reportedly came after the school complained about Mr Allen and his partner sending numerous emails and making “disparaging” comments on a parents’ WhatsApp group.
The couple had previously been banned from entering Cowley Hill Primary School, in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, after questioning the appointment process for a head teacher and “casting aspersions” on the chairman of governors on WhatsApp, The Times reported.
Mr Allen, 50, a producer for Times Radio, told the newspaper he and his partner were blocked from attending the parents’ evening for their daughter Sascha, nine.
‘Silence awkward parents’
He said their treatment showed “massive overreach” by Hertfordshire Constabulary, and that the approach by Cowley Hill primary was intended to “silence awkward parents”.
Mr Allen added: “It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private, and always followed due process.
“Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
The conflict reportedly began in May last year when Mr Allen said he wrote to the school governors questioning why, given that the previous head teacher had announced his retirement six months earlier, an open recruitment process had not begun.
A month later, Jackie Spriggs, who chairs the governors at the school, allegedly wrote to parents saying that the school would take action against anyone who caused “disharmony”.
Mr Allen said that he and his partner expressed their outrage over the warning in a private WhatsApp group.
Overturn the ban
Ms Levine, 46, said she made a comment about Louise Thomas, the acting head teacher, in which she suggested the school was overreacting to social media posts.
Shortly afterwards, the school reportedly banned the couple from visiting the school premises. It allegedly told them they could only make contact via email, and over the coming weeks they said they did so regularly.
The couple said they repeatedly tried to persuade the school to overturn the ban, as their daughter suffers from epilepsy, and launched a formal complaint including their concerns about the head recruitment process.
The school then allegedly asked Hertfordshire police for advice when it considered that the volume of emails was too great.
‘Briefly relieved’
A police officer issued a warning to the family in December and reportedly told them to take Sascha out of the school, which they did the following month, a week before the arrests.
Ms Levine said that when the officers turned up at her door she thought her daughter was dead as she “could not think of any other reason why six police officers would be at my door”.
She added: “My heart was thumping, thinking something terrible had happened. So when I was placed under arrest, in a weird way I was briefly relieved. And then I started to think, ‘what on earth? What the hell is going on?”
The couple said they spent the next 11 hours at Stevenage police station, where they were interviewed under caution before being released at around midnight.
In a statement to The Times, Cowley Hill Primary school said: “We sought advice from the police following a high volume of direct correspondence and public social media posts from two parents, as this was becoming upsetting for staff, parents and governors.
“We’re always happy for parents to raise concerns, but we do ask that they do this in a suitable way, and in line with the school’s published complaints procedure.”
