Mrs Isabelle Cirlan v The Montessori Children’s Hospital Ltd — 2021

Mrs Cirlan worked for The Montessori Children’s Hospital Ltd from 2012 and had a clean disciplinary record. The dispute arose after she sent a private text message to Ms Viktoria Garaiova on 17 September 2019 in which she misspelled Ms Garaiova’s name. The tribunal accepted that Ms Garaiova confronted her about the message on 18 September 2019, and preferred the respondent’s evidence that the claimant responded by shouting and calling Ms Garaiova a bully, with other staff overhearing and a child having to be taken away from the classroom.

The tribunal also preferred the respondent’s evidence about the events of 19 September 2019. It found that Ms Garaiova told the claimant she was suspended for the day, not dismissed, and relied on Ms Jayanthi’s and Ms Sivasubramaniam’s evidence, together with a handwritten note dated 19 September 2019, to support that finding. The tribunal accepted that the claimant genuinely believed she had been sacked, but found that she had misheard or misunderstood what was said.

Applying the implied term of trust and confidence, the tribunal held that neither Ms Garaiova’s conduct on 18 September nor the one-day suspension on 19 September amounted to a repudiatory breach. It said the suspension was not a knee-jerk reaction, was for one day only pending a meeting with Mr Shah, and was a proportionate response to the claimant’s conduct. It also found that Mr Shah’s email of 4 October 2019, which stated that the claimant had not been dismissed and invited her to return to work, did not amount to a breach of the implied term.

The tribunal found that the claimant did not clearly resign at the 24 September 2019 meeting. It held that her solicitors’ letter of 25 September 2019, which stated that she considered herself constructively dismissed if not expressly dismissed and that she was not returning to work, amounted to a resignation. Because there was no express dismissal and no constructive dismissal, the unfair dismissal, constructive unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal, and failure to provide full written particulars of employment claims all failed. No remedy was awarded.