In the UK, a mother and father were taken into custody on suspicion of “harassment and malicious communication” after complaining about their daughter’s primary school. An 9-year-old girl’s parents who criticized their daughter’s primary school in the UK were arrested.

According to the British newspaper The Times, Maxie Allen and her husband Rosalind Levine stated that they were banned from entering Cowley Hill Primary School in Hertfordshire after critiquing the head teacher and the management of the school in a parent WhatsApp group. The school management claimed that following what they considered to be “high volume direct messaging and public social media posts” that caused distress for staff, parents, and administrators, they sought advice from the police. The Hertfordshire police stated that arrests in such matters are routine to ensure that allegations are fully investigated. The police added, “Following further inquiries, officers decided that no further action was necessary due to insufficient evidence.”

Allen, a producer at Times Radio, stated that six police officers arrived at their home on January 29, and told Sky News, “What is this operation? Is it a terrorist cell or a drug den that they are going to raid? No, it was two parents in dispute with a school.” It was reported that Allen had applied for a new head teacher to be appointed at the school by May 2024, but their requests were denied. Following this, the school administrators reportedly warned parents in a letter about “provocative and defamatory” comments on social media, stating that the school would take action against anyone causing disruption.

Times reported that Allen and Levine had conveyed in a private WhatsApp group that they did not believe in the warnings, leading the school to ban them from entering the school building. Following the ban, the couple said they regularly sent emails to the school regarding their disabled daughter’s needs. According to The Times, an officer warned the family in December to take Sascha out of school, which the family did the following month, a week before the arrests. Allen stated that neither he nor Levine had engaged in harassment and they were not informed of which communication constituted a crime. Levine told Sky News that the incident was “unexplainable” for her. Levine said, “We can’t understand what happened; it makes no sense. We had a few investigations, joked around in a WhatsApp group, and then got arrested.”