S (A Child)

Judgment

Mr Justice Bodey:

These are applications for permission to appeal findings in care proceedings made by Her Honour Judge Coates at the Brighton County Court on 16 December 2008, to the effect that the statutory threshold for the making of a care or other similar order had been established. There is also an application in respect of a care and placement order made by the same judge on 17 March 2009. The application for permission has been advanced by Ms Ball QC on behalf of the mother, and by the father who acts in person. The applications are opposed by both the local authority and the children’s guardian.

The child concerned is a girl, S, who was born on 23 February 2002. She was aged just five at the time of the events in April 2007 which took her into interim care. She remains with foster carers to date, pending the outcome of this application for permission to appeal.

The background can for these purposes be shortly stated, although it has become considerable along the way. In December 2006 an anonymous referral was made via the NSPCC to the local social services expressing concerns about S. Those concerns were not established and they do not need to be set out here. However, the consequence was that the parents were seen by the social services, which made the parents angry. They became convinced that a particular teaching assistant at S’s school, whom they had reported for allegedly smacking S, had been the originator of the referral, and they went to the school. There they became angry, vociferous and difficult, to the extent that the head teacher came close to calling the police. The father’s own evidence is that he “lost it”. Subsequently the parents went round to the teaching assistant’s house, taking S with them, but fortunately she was out.

The outcome was that the parents removed S from her school and she did not attend school thereafter until she was taken into interim care. This was for a period of some four and a half months. The judge held that the mother had subsequently misled the education authorities by telling them initially that she was educating S at home, when she subsequently agreed that she was not doing so. She told the educational authority that the father was refusing to complete school entry preference forms until the above complaint which the parents had made against the teaching assistant had been dealt with. Although S only became of compulsory school age shortly before she was taken into care, the parents’ att