Teacher with long Covid awarded £42k for unfair dismissal
A teacher with long Covid has won more than £42,000 in a disability discrimination case after she was fired for taking too much time off work.
Joanna White told an employment tribunal that her deputy head teacher said that she “just had to get on with it” after she raised concerns about her health.
A panel found that Dorothy Stringer School in Brighton was “actively looking” to end her employment as quickly as possible after she took more than six months off sick.
Over a period of 20 months, Ms White had not been able to teach a “full teaching load” for longer than four weeks without taking time off sick, the panel was told.
Ms White sued the city council for disability discrimination and unfair dismissal, and has now been awarded £42,118.50 in compensation.
The tribunal, held in Croydon, south London, heard she started working at the secondary school in 2007.
Ms White already suffered from an autoimmune condition before the pandemic and received a warning about her number of absences in February 2020.
After testing positive for Covid in Nov 2020, she was off work until the start of the next academic term in January 2021.
‘No such thing as rest in teaching’
The tribunal heard: “[Ms White]’s evidence was that on various occasions she raised with Mr [Richard] Baker [the deputy headteacher] and with Ms Poole, the head of year, that she was concerned about her health.
“Her evidence was that she was told by Mr Baker that ‘there is no such thing as rest in teaching’, and told by Ms Poole that she ‘just had to get on with it’.
“Mr Baker accepted in evidence that he was aware that [Ms White] was feeling tired during that period, and that the school was aware of it, although he denied saying, ‘there is no such thing as rest in teaching.’”
Ms White told the school on March 3, 2021 that she had symptoms of Long Covid, and she was signed off work between March 10 and April 7 that year.
She was then off with the condition again between May 18, 2021 and December 12, 2021.
On January 27, 2022, Ms White was invited to a meeting in which she was given a second warning about her absence. Her employers thought they gave her a reduced workload on her return, but she felt it was “equivalent”.
An occupational health report was written in August 2022, which outlined recommendations to reduce her workload in the next academic year.
‘Unlikely to be able to teach a full timetable’
The following month, however, she suffered concussion from a head injury and was signed off from work until November.
A school report noted: “Since February 2021, a period of 20 months, [Ms White] had not been able to teach a full teaching load for longer than four weeks without a period of sickness absence.”
It also said the occupational therapist report said she would be “unlikely to be able to teach a full timetable within the next year without considerable adjustments”.
The school’s report concluded that she should be dismissed on the grounds of capability.
Employment Judge Adam Leith said that the decision breached the school’s policies, ruling it was unreasonable to dismiss Ms White, and she was therefore discriminated against because of her disability.
The judge added: “The school had a detailed and no doubt carefully drafted policy.
“Departing from it in a way which (essentially) shortcut the process, in and of itself, gave rise to the inference that the school was actively looking to bring [Ms White]’s employment to an end as expediently as possible.”
Ms White has chosen not to be a teacher any more because of “the way her trust with the school had been broken”, the tribunal heard.
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