Before it catapulted a small school community in London’s commuter belt into the centre of a global news story, the year-four class WhatsApp group at Cowley Hill school in Borehamwood was unremarkable – a place of snide comments, reminders about non-uniform day and flustered messages about being late for the school run.
“It was mum gossip, you know?” said one member, Sarah. “A bit juicy, but it wasn’t anything nasty.”
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 “political revolution”.
In its own – thoroughly improbable – way, it raised a question that might feel familiar to many whose phones get overtaken by the school group chat: what’s 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.
On a micro level, its impact has been seismic. “A lot of parents don’t talk to each other any more,” said Sarah. “It feels like you’re back on the playground. You feel like you can’t voice an opinion without people ganging up on you.”
Cowley Hill - year 4
From WhatsApp
Parent 1 Must be something else or they’ve sent it in general to everyone as a shut up and get on with it 🙄
Rosalind Maybe there’s other stuff too doing on. No idea. But what I do know is they can’t control what anyone says. Anywhere.
Parent 1 Everyone’s talking about it on the playground aswell! It’s ridiculous
Rosalind Haha! I’m also pretty sure [name] didn’t write that letter. She hasn’t got a clue about anything.
Parent 1 I was thinking that
Rosalind Love the way [she] has her little spies in WhatsApp and Facebook groups to keep an eye on what’s being said 🤣 They seriously need to get lives lol.
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 £20,000 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.
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. “All I would say is that there are two sides to every story,” she said. “There’s been a lot of upset.”
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 “upsetting and derogatory social media posts, on Facebook and WhatsApp”. It reported the couple’s actions to police and, after a warning, banned them from the school grounds.
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.
Sitting in their living room, a brisk 10-minute walk from the school, Allen said the experience had been, to put it mildly, surreal. “It has taken on a life of its own,” he said. “It’s almost now as if it’s happened to somebody else.”
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 – a widely shared moment captured for posterity by a doorbell cam – she thought her daughter, who has epilepsy, had died. “Every time I see that footage of the police coming to the door, I feel sick,” she said.
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.
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 “a very small minority” were using WhatsApp and social media to “to cause disharmony” and “make inflammatory and defamatory comments about senior leaders in the school”.
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 “communication management measures”. It suddenly felt like a whodunnit, said Sarah. “You’re looking at other people, like, was it her? Who’s screenshotting our messages? And that itself was awful.”
Cowley Hill - year 4
From WhatsApp
Rosalind Can you imagine what the ‘action’ is they say they’ll take? ‘Hello 999? One of the school mums said something mean about me in a school mum WhatsApp group. Please can you arrest them?’
Maxie No public body has the power to control what people say about it.
Parent 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.
Rosalind Absolutely. I thought the Facebook group I wrote in was a safe space.
Maxie Regardless, what we say, or not, is none of their business. Schools have no power beyond their gates.
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’s complaints process.
The school said in a statement that it welcomed dialogue with parents but “the nature and large volume of the communication and public posts” during the dispute meant it was “no longer able to manage using normal internal procedures”.
In November, Michelle Vince, a former county councillor, also emailed the school to query the headteacher recruitment process after being cc’ed in correspondence by Allen. In December, Allen and Vince were visited by a police constable.
Vince was out, but in an email seen by the Guardian, police asked her to cease communication with the school “as you may find yourself liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. The whole story had “created a culture of fear”, she said. “It certainly put the fear of God into me.”
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. “Following 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 … We are confident that this was a fair, transparent and timely process,” it said.
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. “The [then deputy head] told me she knows many people and she can call the police on me,” the woman said. A spokesperson for the school said its now headteacher “does not recognise this description of the conversation and refutes this accusation noting that no subsequent formal complaint was received by the school”.
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’ use of social media to discuss their grievances. Did the couple ever worry they were causing discord in a finely balanced eco-system?
“It’s one thing if you’re saying, let’s go and throw stones, or using a lot of very personal, pejorative language,” said Allen. “But what we did was to comment on governance and policy and how [the school] was run. You can’t immune a public authority from that scrutiny because it happens to be a school.”
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 “providing an excellent education for its pupils” and will not comment further.
What is clear is that this very modern school drama has left a mark on everyone involved. “None of the mums talk to each other now really,” said Sarah. “It’s left a horrible impact.” She said the WhatsApp group remained open but largely unused. “Funny enough, one mum actually wrote in there about a week ago,” she said. “She was asking for someone to help for a pickup.” No one replied.
