“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 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”.
Allen said that he and his partner expressed their outrage over the warning in a private WhatsApp group.
Levine said she made a comment about Louise Thomas, the acting head teacher, in which she suggested the school was overreacting to social media posts.
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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.
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.
Levine said that when the officers turned up at her door she thought her elder daughter was dead as she “could not think of any other reason why six police officers would be at my door”.
“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 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.”