This is a story about democracy in Britain, how badly it is broken and how it might be fixed. It is about people battling arrogant bureaucrats and highly paid company executives. Yet it is a world away from television debates, trade negotiations or legal small print. It concerns instead something far more fundamental: the schools our children attend. And it begins 30 miles from Westminster, in an Essex market town on Monday night this week.

While outside is drizzle and dark, inside Waltham Abbey town hall are almost 200 people worried about the future of a primary school. This meeting has been pulled together on a shoestring by parents living in a part of Essex where politics is usually about working out which candidate is wearing the blue rosette. Only tonight this hall looks like the setting for a suburban mutiny.

The horrible truth that emerges over this evening is they have precisely no say in the school's future

Parents sit swaddled in their anoraks, their kids play in a makeshift creche at the back. A whole staff room of teachers and dinner ladies have turned up while some local shopkeepers have shut early to get here. The queue stretches out the door. These people love Waltham Holy Cross primary school, yet the horrible truth that emerges over this evening is they have precisely no say in its future. Because the government has decreed that Waltham Holy Cross will be handed to a chain of academy schools in May. As has already happened to over 7,000 other state schools in England since 2010, a public asset built and maintained by generations of taxpayers will be gifted to a charitable trust to run as it wants. Together these schools make up perhaps the biggest private landgrab on the public sector this decade and, just like the others, Waltham Holy Cross will disappear forever from daily democratic control.

Starting in May, Net Academies Trust will take over the school, setting staff pay and conditions and dictating how long pupils must stay each day. Executives will also control the site and, although Net denied to me any plans to sell school land, private emails that have emerged through freedom of information requests show council officials consulting each other this spring because the trust “think they will need to dispose of some land to fund rebuild/remodel/improvement”. For such self-described improvements, executives are paid handsomely: the head of Net, Jo Coton, earns between £100,000 and £110,000 a year. By my reckoning, that sum gets you three newly minted teachers and perhaps even some classroom support. Instead, Waltham Holy Cross must cut staff.

At Monday’s meeting one parent, Lauren Alston, described how staff looked after her autistic six-year-old by taking him out of class for a few short breaks during the day. “It gets the fizz out of his bottle,” she explained to me, meant that he was easier to handle when he got home. Alston is also a teacher in Essex who works alongside former Net staff. “I know my boy won’t be able to cope if Net run this school,” she told the hall and all you could hear was hundreds of people listening very hard.

These are forever decisions, affecting not just the 600 children now at the school but generations far into the future, and they should be properly and publicly discussed. Yet parents and teachers and school support have been locked out of the process. Says teacher Ben Collins: “We are voiceless.”

Outside this town hall, the drumbeat these days is a nationwide worry about the fragility of democracy. Yet the scandal of Waltham Holy Cross demonstrates that the failure of democracy goes far wider and deeper than Brexit and Westminster. It erodes the very building blocks of our lives and our communities, such as what happens to our kids during the day. Since the school was judged to be failing this spring by Ofsted – a judgment fiercely protested by staff and parents – every major decision on its future and that of its children has been taken in back rooms with no consultation and minimal transparency. Parents have had to winkle it out through making almost 100 freedom of information requests within a few months. Only through these do we know that the draft Ofsted report was full of errors. Or that Net was being sounded out on “their appetite to take on this school” in January, well over a month before the Ofsted verdict was even published. Or that the headteacher wrote to the Department for Education to propose another academy trust, but was ignored.

What is public is that, according to the Education Policy Institute, Net is the seventh poorest-performing primary school group in the country. What is public is that two of Net’s schools were declared by Ofsted to be failing – and will now be handed over to yet another academy chain, at yet more expense to the taxpayer but no penalty to Net. What is public is that when the Department for Education’s top civil servant, Jonathan Slater, was asked by MPs in May for “quantifiable, tangible evidence” that academisation provided better value for money than local authority support for schools like Waltham Holy Cross judged to be “inadequate”, he replied, “I can’t prove that … nobody could.”

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That response shows up the government’s academy programme for the crude dogma it is. Academisation comes straight out of the headbangers’ handbook: first slash funding to the public realm, then point out its failures, then invite in the private sector to run and control it. You’ve seen it done to housing, to the NHS, and now to our schools. Each time it costs you and me a lot of money: the National Audit Office estimates that £745m of taxpayers’ money has been spent just on converting schools to academies since 2010.

And the headbangers usually get away with it – until every so often, a bunch of ordinary people start asking questions and deciding they don’t like the answers. That’s what has happened at Waltham Holy Cross. To defend what they see as “the best school in the universe”, parents have led the resistance – with teachers only latterly joining the fight. One union official reports that council officials now refer to the uprising there as “the biggest, most sustained parents’ protest Essex has seen”.

Each time, the response has been to try to shut them out and each time the parents come back harder. They demand meetings with Ofsted – and get one. This Saturday, they chased their local MP around Tesco to buttonhole her for support. There is a homespun heroism about their efforts that I would take in a heartbeat over corporate mission statements and bland bureaucrat-speak. Writing about them here a few months ago, I said I’d thought they’d win. After Monday, I no longer think that, I’m sure of it. The question is, what does the rest of Britain have to learn from the parents of Waltham Holy Cross?

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist