The Supreme Court only features rarely in posts on this blog. There was the case of the parent from the Isle of Wight that decided the issue of holidays taken in school terms, and the case relating to when criminal offences should be spent that affected both volunteers and employees wanting to work in educational settings.

This month, the Supreme Court has decided a case about the use of the proceeds of a school site at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire. The original site for the school was given to the local authority, not in the Nineteenth Century, when so many sites were, but in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the local Elementary School needed to expand and required more land for new buildings.

Eventually, that site needed to be replaced as well, and the County Council purchased an adjacent site and built new school buildings. The school moved into the new buildings leaving the former site vacant. The County sold the vacant former school site to developers. The successors of the original grantor of the land for use as a school then claimed the proceeds of the sale under the reverter clause, as the land was no longer being used for a school.

The Supreme Court had to decide who benefited from the proceeds of the sale; the County Council or those entitled if the reverter clause came into effect? Lower courts had decided first one way and then the other. You can read the judgement of the Supreme Court at https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0062-judgment.pdf

The court’s conclusion was that:

51. We conclude that, having regard to the purposes of the 1841 Act, Richard Spearman QC, at first instance, was correct to hold that, when section 14 is invoked, it is not necessary for the site to be sold before the school is moved to another site and closed on the site given by the grantor. Accordingly, we would allow this appeal.

In essence, this turned on a decision of how to interpret legislation, albeit in this case a piece of legislation 180 years old. As a young undergraduate in the 1960s at LSE, I took a first year course in constitutional law and I still recall the lecture on the rules of interpretation: in those days, as I recall, it was one of; the Literal Rule, The Golden Rule or the Mischief Rule.

In this case, the Supreme Court seems to have said that a piece of legislation must be read ‘in the round’ and that by doing so it places less weight on the Literal Rule. Applying Clause 2 of the legislation without Clause 14 being taken into account would have returned the land to the heirs of the grantor, but Clause 14 anticipated that there might be a need for a school to be rebuilt on a different site and created situations where to do so did not lead to a reversion of the land to the grantor or their heirs.  

This legislation is of especial interest to the Church of England as many of their schools were built on land granted under transfers, with a reverter clause attached if the site was not used for specific purposes, such as education. If the current downturn in the birth rate and a National Funding formula that makes small rural primary schools no longer viable over the next few years, then there might be more cases coming to court to settle who receives the proceeds of the land on which a school once operated.