Miss I Khanem v Berkshire Schools Trust — 2022

Miss I Khanem was employed by Berkshire Schools Trust as a teacher at New Christ Church School from 2014 until her dismissal on 15 May 2019. The tribunal accepted that the respondent had already placed her on a capability support programme because of concerns about teaching, classroom management, and pupil outcomes. It also accepted that the school was operating within a safeguarding framework that included multiple LADO referrals in relation to the claimant's conduct before the dismissal process began.

The tribunal found that the respondent had a genuine belief, based on a reasonable investigation, that the claimant had committed the conduct allegations arising from Child A’s complaint and from later concerns about behaviour management. It found that Child A had likely been denied toilet access and later wet herself, that the claimant’s questioning of Child A could properly be viewed as intimidating, and that the loss of Golden Time was either unjustified punishment or neglect of the child. It also found reasonable grounds for concerns about the claimant’s handling of Child H and about the claimant’s use of discriminatory language towards colleagues, including references to sexual orientation, mocking accents, and derogatory expressions. On that evidence, the panel was entitled to categorise the allegations as misconduct or gross misconduct and to decide that summary dismissal was appropriate.

The unfair dismissal claim therefore failed. The tribunal held that the reason for dismissal was conduct, that the investigation and disciplinary process were reasonable, that the decision to dismiss was within the band of reasonable responses, and that the procedure was fair, including on appeal. It rejected the claimant’s case that the disciplinary process was a pretext for dismissing an older and more expensive teacher, noting that the Trust’s recruitment adverts were not shown to relate to her post and that there was no evidence that cost or age played any part in the decision.

Both age discrimination claims failed. For direct discrimination, the tribunal found that age was not the reason for dismissal and that a hypothetical comparator in the same disciplinary position would also have been dismissed. For indirect discrimination, it found that the claimant had not established the alleged PCP of dismissing more expensive teachers, that the school’s staffing statistics were too small to support a meaningful inference, and that the evidence did not show cost to have been a factor in the dismissal decision. No award was made because all claims were dismissed.