Case 6006213/2024 · Employment Tribunal
Mr D Stockton v Threemilestone Education Ltd — 2025
- Case reference
- 6006213/2024
- Decision date
- 17 April 2025
- Jurisdiction
- England & Wales
- Judge
- Employment Judge Eeley
Parties
2 namedClaimant
Mr D Stockton
Respondent
Key findings
Tribunal's reasoningThe claimant brought an unfair dismissal claim after being dismissed from his role as headteacher of an independent specialist school. The respondent said the reason for dismissal was conduct, arising from safeguarding and compliance concerns including the claimant signing off the single central record as legally compliant without properly checking it and sending a reference contrary to an express instruction.
The tribunal concluded that the sole or principal reason for dismissal was conduct. It found that the respondent had a genuine belief in the claimant's guilt, based on reasonable grounds after a reasonable investigation, and that both the procedure and the decision to dismiss were within the range of reasonable responses.
The tribunal also stated that, if it had found procedural unfairness, it would have found the dismissal substantively fair and applied a 100% Polkey reduction. It further indicated that any finding of substantive unfairness would have led to a significant contributory fault deduction.
Claims and outcomes
1 finding recorded| Claim type | Issue or finding | Outcome | Protected characteristic | Award |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unfair dismissal | The judgment states that the claimant's claim of unfair dismissal is not well founded and is dismissed. The supplied prompt text is truncated in the middle, but it includes the judgment result and concluding reasons. | Dismissed | — | — |
Legal tests applied
3 references- section 98(4) Employment Rights Act 1996
- range of reasonable responses
- Polkey
Official outcome judgment PDF
Gov.uk primary recordThe official judgment PDF on gov.uk contains the tribunal's outcome, reasoning, and any remedy details. Where this page does not yet show extracted outcomes for every claim, use the PDF as the authoritative source.
Published on gov.uk under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
How we got this data
Case essentials (reference, date, judge, venue, country, claim categories) are extracted from the structured metadata gov.uk publishes alongside each decision. Parties and monetary figures are extracted from the judgment PDF text. Key findings and per-claim outcomes require a second extraction pass that is not yet complete for this case — until then, the primary source linked above is the authoritative record. See full methodology.
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