Roedean’s ‘feisty’ ex-pupils take school to task over its finances

IT IS one of the country’s leading girls’ schools, founded by three sisters to prepare young women for entrance to women’s colleges at Cambridge.

But Roedean School has become embroiled in a bitter dispute with a group of “feisty” alumnae over its governance and finances.

The Charity Commission has told the £42,000-a-year boarding school – a registered charity – to bring in mediators in an effort to end hostilities that have erupted between its Council members.

A group of old girls, known as Old Roedeanians, has gone public and one has released a series of videos on YouTube detailing her objections to the running of the school.

Helen Jeffries, a 61-year-old retired commodity trader from Surrey who studied at Roedean in the 1970s, said she has been trying to raise the alarm for years to no avail.

“We have been asking questions since 2016 and very few have been answered,” she said. “Lots of us Old Roedeanians are pretty feisty. We are never told the whole story, there is so much smoke and mirrors going on.”

Emily Campbell, a 51-year-old former management accountant and Old Roedeanian, said: “We have tried to shout loudly but politely. We wrote lots of polite letters.”

The rebel group is critical of the decision by Roedean to acquire Moira House, a girls’ private school, in 2017 by guaranteeing £3 million in loans. But, according to the Charity Commission, Moira House’s financial position “continued to worsen” even after this cash injection, and was closed in 2020.

The Old Roedeanians are also concerned about a series of loans, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, made to Deepdene, a co-educational preparatory school in East Sussex. They claim that this goes against the school’s Royal Charter, since Roedean was set up to further the education of girls.

The Charity Commission opened a regulatory compliance case and wrote to the school’s trustees last month to summarise their findings. These included instances where the trustees “failed to act with reasonable care and skill” which is “considered misconduct and/or mismanagement in the administration of a charity”.

The charity watchdog also notes that a member of the public would “find it difficult to understand how the decisions made in respect of Deepdene can be seen to be in the best interests of the charity” and warns about possible “damage” to the charity’s reputation.

However, they add that the decision to buy Moira House was “within the range of decisions that a reasonable trustee body could make”.

The watchdog said Roedean has made “very limited and in some cases no progress” on plans to undergo mediation to resolve disputes, saying this

‘Very few of our questions have been answered since 2016. We have tried to shout loudly but politely’

must be done “without further delay”. Closing the compliance case last month with no further action, the Charity Commission urged Roedean to carry out a review of its Royal Charter, as well as an external governance review.

The watchdog said they “are not taking any further regulatory action at this stage” because trustees have “provided assurances” that its concerns were being addressed.

Vivien Smiley, chair of Roedean’s council, said: “The Charity Commission has written that it was closing a regulatory compliance case with no action being taken. We plan an external governance review to ensure the highest quality of governance.

“Roedean is thriving and has outperformed the market on many measures. It has been very successful over the last nine years, in terms of revenue, pupil numbers, quality of education, capital investment, academic results, and in widening access through bursaries and awards.”