Ms C Morris v The Endeavour Learning Trust — 2020

Ms C Morris had been employed at Tarleton Academy since 2003 and was Head of Modern Foreign Languages at the point she resigned on 4 April 2019. She had previously received a TLR payment of £5,778 per annum, which was safeguarded when the school was restructured in 2015 and was due to reduce on 1 September 2018. In May 2018, when the school was becoming an academy, Mrs Lesley Gwinnett agreed to use a recruitment and retention fund to keep the claimant’s pay at the same level for a further year.

In December 2018 the respondent raised informal concerns with the claimant about email sign-offs, a pupil complaint about pressure, and her communication to parents and pupils about contacting staff during breaks. The claimant was also offered the role of interim Head of the Humanities Faculty, which she declined. In January 2019 she was asked to take on a limited set of additional duties, including attending a Wednesday meeting and feeding back to the department on Thursday mornings. The tribunal found that this was a request for a small amount of additional responsibility, not an imposed requirement, and that the salary extension had been described in a conflated way as an extended TLR/recruitment and retention allowance.

Applying section 95 ERA 1996, the implied term of trust and confidence, and the authorities it cited including Kaur v Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and London Borough of Waltham Forest v Omilaju, the tribunal held that there was no fundamental breach. It found that the concerns had been raised informally, not as disciplinary action, that the extra duties were insignificant in scope, and that the respondent had done what it could to retain the claimant. Even if the safeguarding issue in 2015 had amounted to a breach, the tribunal said it had long since been affirmed. The claim therefore failed and the tribunal recorded that the claimant resigned and was not unfairly constructively dismissed. No monetary award was made.