Ms J Horn v The International School of Screen Acting — 2022

Ms J Horn had been engaged by The International School of Screen Acting from October 2015 as a self-employed voice and movement teacher at £25 per hour, invoicing the respondent and paying her own tax and national insurance. In June or July 2018 she was also offered an Associate Director role with additional payments, but the tribunal found there was never any contract setting out terms that included those duties. It preferred the respondent's evidence that the Associate Director role remained limited, administrative and capable of being done in a short time and largely at a place and time of the claimant's choosing.

Applying the employment-status authorities it cited, including Ready Mixed Concrete, Autoclenz and Nethermere, the tribunal found that the claimant was not an employee at any point. It accepted that she controlled course content and delivery, that no one told her how to teach, that she was free to work for others and in fact did so, and that she traded through her own limited company. It also found no sufficient mutuality of obligation: the claimant invoiced for agreed sums, had no set hours, and took on extra tasks on her own initiative rather than because the respondent instructed her to do so.

The tribunal then considered worker status under section 230(3)(b) ERA 1996 and the equivalent Equality Act test. It found that the claimant was not obliged to provide her services personally because she had a real, if conditional, right of substitution, and substitute tutors had in fact been used by others. It also found that, in relation to the Associate Director role, she could arrange for Raminta to cover tasks such as opening and locking up, and that she had asked for another tutor to assist her. In the alternative, it held that she was supplying services in the course of her own business and that the respondent was a customer of that business.

On that basis, the tribunal held that it had no jurisdiction to hear the unfair dismissal, disability discrimination, equal pay and unlawful deduction from wages claims, and those claims stood dismissed. It also held that it had no free-standing breach of contract jurisdiction because the claimant was not an employee, so that claim was dismissed as well.