A mum and dad say they were locked up for 11 hours after they complained about the recruitment process at their daughter’s school on WhatsApp.
A British couple faced an 11-hour police detention after raising concerns about their daughter’s primary school headteacher recruitment process in a parents’ WhatsApp group. Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine were arrested at their home on January 29 by six officers – while their three-year-old daughter Francesca watched in tears – over alleged harassment and malicious communications. Police dropped the case five weeks later, with Allen stating: “At no point were we given a smoking gun…the reason they haven’t given it is because it doesn’t exist.” The dispute began when Allen, a former school governor, questioned why Cowley Hill Primary hadn’t conducted an open recruitment process.
The school’s chair of governors Jackie Spriggs had warned parents about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media comments, prompting Levine to mock the threat in the WhatsApp group: “‘Hello 999, one of the school mums said something mean about me…Please can you arrest them?'” The police defended the number of officers involved, citing the need to safeguard children, while the school claimed it sought law enforcement advice due to the volume of correspondence and public social media posts from the parents. However, neither the police nor the school provided concrete examples of any wrongdoing.
The couple remains banned from school premises despite the dropped charges.