Mrs B Blaze v The Governing Body of Ysgol Penrhyn and 1 other — 2020

Mrs B Blaze, a teacher aged 62, was dismissed on 31 August 2019 in a redundancy exercise at Ysgol Penrhyn after the school identified a budget shortfall of £114,000 for 2019/20 and decided that one teacher redundancy was required. The tribunal accepted that redundancy was the reason for dismissal. It also accepted that the selection pool of all teaching staff other than the headteacher and deputy headteacher was reasonable, and that the selection criteria were ones used across the Authority's schools and had been applied through an anonymised scoring process. The Claimant initially scored lowest, at 13, and after representations her score rose to 15, still below the next candidate.

The unfair dismissal claim succeeded because the tribunal found a defect in consultation. It accepted that the Claimant had raised the possibility of moving to a job-share during her first consultation meeting, but this was not taken forward or explored with other staff. The tribunal held that a reasonable employer would have asked whether any other staff member would be willing to job-share, and that failure took the process outside the range of reasonable responses under section 98(4) ERA 1996. Other complaints about the pool, criteria, union consultation, and redeployment did not succeed. The tribunal also recorded that the Claimant had participated in the Authority's redeployment process and that nothing suitable arose.

The direct age discrimination claim failed. Applying section 136 Equality Act 2010 and the guidance in Madarassy, the tribunal found no facts from which it could infer discrimination. It accepted evidence that two teachers were paid more than the Claimant because of additional responsibility allowances, that one other teacher was on the same pay point and another would shortly reach it, and that the Claimant was only approximately in the middle of the salary range. The tribunal accepted that anonymisation was used and that savings beyond those arising from redundancy did not play a part in the decision.

On remedy, the tribunal said there would be no basic award because of section 122(4)(b) ERA. It applied a 50% Polkey reduction to any compensatory award because there was judged to be as much chance of a job-sharing arrangement being successfully implemented as not. It also stated that the amount of any redundancy payment paid above statutory entitlement, recorded as £6,820.27, would need to be deducted from any compensatory award under section 123(7) ERA. The precise compensation was left to be determined unless the parties reached agreement.