We are a small charity with families who attend a group session with their children. We also run an educational course outside of that family group. An ex-member has asked if their child (accompanied by the parent) can attend the course. We said no as the parent left after making online posts that broke our behaviour policies. We didn't exclude, they left before that happened.

They have made a formal complaint that we are discriminating against their child because of her 'constructive criticism' within our online messaging group. Her posts contained things like 'I've noticed the group is becoming quite cliquey between certain members' and here's an article that may help with that.....the article just describing what a clique is and saying that people in a clique can be insulting, humiliating, bossy, and demanding of people outside it.

Many took this personally, and complained (including all our trustees).

We really don't want to go down the road of involving lawyers, charity commission, etc with this. It's purely that they said things online which caused offence, then left our membership and refused to communicate with us, asked to rejoin, we said no and referred to our policies, they have complained as they didn't mean to cause offence and say that people should not have taken offence and should welcome the criticism as it's helpful.

The things said online upset our trustees to the point that they would prefer to cancel the course rather than have to have the parent there.

The parent has asked for an apology from us for the pain and distress caused to their family, we are happy to acknowledge our regret that they are feeling any pain or distress about this, but don't want to open ourselves up to anything legal if that in anyway implies that we accept we acted incorrectly?