\n<\/p>\n
Before it catapulted a small school community in London\u2019s commuter belt into the centre of a global news story, the year-four class WhatsApp group at Cowley Hill school in Borehamwood was unremarkable \u2013 a place of snide comments, reminders about non-uniform day and flustered messages about being late for the school run.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was mum gossip, you know?\u201d said one member, Sarah. \u201cA bit juicy, but it wasn\u2019t anything nasty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah, who asked to use a pseudonym, is nervous about talking about the group, and little wonder. A conversation and controversy that started in the unofficial parent chat culminated in the arrest of two parents in the Hertfordshire town, sparking fierce debate about police overreach, the right to free speech and the relationship between schools and parents. The saga was covered around the world, discussed in parliament and drew the attention of Elon Musk on X, who appears to have viewed it as grounds for a \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d.<\/p>\n
In its own \u2013 thoroughly improbable \u2013 way, it raised a question that might feel familiar to many whose phones get overtaken by the school group chat: what\u2019s the difference between a concerned parent, a busybody and someone who should face the full force of the law? Inevitably, it also featured a doorbell cam.<\/p>\n
On a micro level, its impact has been seismic. \u201cA lot of parents don\u2019t talk to each other any more,\u201d said Sarah. \u201cIt feels like you\u2019re back on the playground. You feel like you can\u2019t voice an opinion without people ganging up on you.\u201d<\/p>\n
From WhatsApp<\/em><\/p>\n Parent 1 <\/strong>Must be something else or they\u2019ve sent it in general to everyone as a shut up and get on with it \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n Rosalind <\/strong>Maybe there\u2019s other stuff too doing on. No idea. But what I do know is they can\u2019t control what anyone says. Anywhere.<\/p>\n Parent 1 <\/strong>Everyone\u2019s talking about it on the playground aswell! It\u2019s ridiculous<\/p>\n Rosalind <\/strong>Haha! I\u2019m also pretty sure [name] didn\u2019t write that letter. She hasn\u2019t got a clue about anything.<\/p>\n Parent 1 <\/strong>I was thinking that<\/p>\n Rosalind <\/strong>Love the way [she] has her little spies in WhatsApp and Facebook groups to keep an eye on what\u2019s being said \ud83e\udd23 They seriously need to get lives lol.<\/p>\n This week the parents at Cowley Hill primary again found themselves caught in a surrealist fish bowl, after Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, the couple at the centre of the row, revealed they had been given a \u00a320,000 payout by Hertfordshire police, who admitted they had been wrongfully arrested and detained in January. The force said there had been no issues of misconduct by its officers, but that the legal test for arrest had not been met.<\/p>\n On a bitingly cold morning outside the large primary, harried parents were understandably reluctant to talk. One woman stopped briefly to say the school had been amazing with her autistic child. Another said the story had been impossible to ignore given it was plastered all over social media. \u201cAll I would say is that there are two sides to every story,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of upset.\u201d<\/p>\n So what went so badly wrong? In the most basic terms, from spring last year Allen and Levine, who both work in the media, made complaints about the school directly, in a school WhatsApp group they set up and on social media. The school said it had been bombarded by \u201cupsetting and derogatory social media posts, on Facebook and WhatsApp\u201d. It reported the couple\u2019s actions to police and, after a warning, banned them from the school grounds.<\/p>\n The couple were arrested in January on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property, but after an investigation police said in March that no action would be taken against them. Then they told their story to the Times, where Allen worked as a producer, and the story went stratospheric.<\/p>\n Sitting in their living room, a brisk 10-minute walk from the school, Allen said the experience had been, to put it mildly, surreal. \u201cIt has taken on a life of its own,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost now as if it\u2019s happened to somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n Levine said they had been left with a deep distrust of the police. When six uniformed officers from Hertfordshire police showed up at their door \u2013 a widely shared moment captured for posterity by a doorbell cam \u2013 she thought her daughter, who has epilepsy, had died. \u201cEvery time I see that footage of the police coming to the door, I feel sick,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n <\/span>Doorbell footage shows police turning up to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine \u2013 video<\/span><\/p>\n According to Levine and Allen, the trouble started in November 2023 when the school announced its headteacher would retire in June 2024, with the deputy taking over as acting head.<\/p>\n Allen, a former parent-governor of the school, wrote to governors in May 2024 asking why an open recruitment process had not started. In June the chair of governors wrote to all parents saying that \u201ca very small minority\u201d were using WhatsApp and social media to \u201cto cause disharmony\u201d and \u201cmake inflammatory and defamatory comments about senior leaders in the school\u201d.<\/p>\n Levine and Allen stand by discussing the school issues on WhatsApp, and said their comments were private and not abusive. But the school sent the couple a letter in July referencing WhatsApp messages they had sent and saying if they did not stop the school would consider \u201ccommunication management measures\u201d. It suddenly felt like a whodunnit, said Sarah. \u201cYou\u2019re looking at other people, like, was it her? Who\u2019s screenshotting our messages? And that itself was awful.\u201d<\/p>\n From WhatsApp<\/em><\/p>\n Rosalind <\/strong>Can you imagine what the \u2018action\u2019 is they say they\u2019ll take? \u2018Hello 999? One of the school mums said something mean about me in a school mum WhatsApp group. Please can you arrest them?\u2019<\/p>\n Maxie <\/strong>No public body has the power to control what people say about it.<\/p>\n Parent <\/strong>This should be a safe group where parents feel free to speak and share opinions about how they feel about the school and its actions and activities nothing more or less, end of story.<\/p>\n Rosalind <\/strong>Absolutely. I thought the Facebook group I wrote in was a safe space.<\/p>\n Maxie <\/strong>Regardless, what we say, or not, is none of their business. Schools have no power beyond their gates.<\/p>\n The couple responded in the same month, copying in a county councillor and some local education authority officials, and Levine posted the letter on her personal Facebook profile. Then, six days after the warning, they were banned from the school premises, forbidden to speak to or see teachers, and given an email address and told it would be monitored once a week. They later sent a subject access request and went through the school\u2019s complaints process.<\/p>\n The school said in a statement that it welcomed dialogue with parents but \u201cthe nature and large volume of the communication and public posts\u201d during the dispute meant it was \u201cno longer able to manage using normal internal procedures\u201d.<\/p>\n In November, Michelle Vince, a former county councillor, also emailed the school to query the headteacher recruitment process after being cc\u2019ed in correspondence by Allen. In December, Allen and Vince were visited by a police constable.<\/p>\n Vince was out, but in an email seen by the Guardian, police asked her to cease communication with the school \u201cas you may find yourself liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation\u201d. The whole story had \u201ccreated a culture of fear\u201d, she said. \u201cIt certainly put the fear of God into me.\u201d<\/p>\n Allen and Levine were arrested on 29 January, five days after their daughter had started at a new school. At 1.05pm, 66 minutes after officers arrived at their house, Cowley Hill primary sent out an email announcing that the acting headteacher had got the job. Hertfordshire county council said in a statement that the role had been advertised publicly and followed all regulations. \u201cFollowing the departure of the former headteacher, an interim head was appointed for the one term to allow time for a proper recruitment process to be carried out \u2026 We are confident that this was a fair, transparent and timely process,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n One parent at the same school as Allen and Levine said she had also been told to shut down a WhatsApp group in 2022, and she had politely refused. \u201cThe [then deputy head] told me she knows many people and she can call the police on me,\u201d the woman said. A spokesperson for the school said its now headteacher \u201cdoes not recognise this description of the conversation and refutes this accusation noting that no subsequent formal complaint was received by the school\u201d.<\/p>\n The couple say that since they first told their story in March, dozens of other parents claiming excessive responses to raising issues at their own schools have been in touch. Online, others have criticised the parents\u2019 use of social media to discuss their grievances. Did the couple ever worry they were causing discord in a finely balanced eco-system?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one thing if you\u2019re saying, let\u2019s go and throw stones, or using a lot of very personal, pejorative language,\u201d said Allen. \u201cBut what we did was to comment on governance and policy and how [the school] was run. You can\u2019t immune a public authority from that scrutiny because it happens to be a school.\u201d<\/p>\n Allen and Levine now want the Department for Education to conduct a full review of what happened. The school, which declined requests for interviews, has said it continues to focus on \u201cproviding an excellent education for its pupils\u201d and will not comment further.<\/p>\n What is clear is that this very modern school drama has left a mark on everyone involved. \u201cNone of the mums talk to each other now really,\u201d said Sarah. \u201cIt\u2019s left a horrible impact.\u201d She said the WhatsApp group remained open but largely unused. \u201cFunny enough, one mum actually wrote in there about a week ago,\u201d she said. \u201cShe was asking for someone to help for a pickup.\u201d No one replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before it catapulted a small school community in London\u2019s commuter belt into the centre of a global news story, the year-four class WhatsApp group at Cowley Hill school in Borehamwood was unremarkable \u2013 a place of snide comments, reminders about non-uniform day and flustered messages about being late for the school run. \u201cIt was mum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[5718,2813,630,431,588,19803,19804,17179,5564,5585],"class_list":{"0":"post-34999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-arrest","9":"tag-messages","10":"tag-parents","11":"tag-saga","12":"tag-schools","13":"tag-screenshotting","14":"tag-spiralled","15":"tag-whatsapp","16":"tag-whos","17":"tag-wrongful"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cowley Hill – year 4<\/h2>\n