The Court of Appeal has reduced a damages award to a former special needs assistant by €47,000, while dismissing the school board’s appeal against the finding that its treatment of her amounted to workplace bullying under the applicable code.
In a judgment delivered on 8 December 2015, Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan said the High Court had been entitled to find that the Board of Management of St Anne’s School and its principal subjected the plaintiff to repeated inappropriate behaviour that could reasonably be regarded as undermining her dignity at work.
The case concerned a disciplinary process that followed an incident in September 2009, when the plaintiff locked the door of the school’s Sensory Room while inside with a pupil. The Court of Appeal accepted that the board was entitled to regard the locked door as a serious child protection concern. But the High Court had found that many special needs assistants used the lock, and that the plaintiff was singled out without an adequate inquiry into that practice.
The disciplinary process included a final written warning. The High Court found that the board later rejected the plaintiff’s appeal without meaningful consideration of her claim that locking the door was common practice. The Court of Appeal concluded that the trial judge was right to treat the conduct over the course of the process as repeated behaviour, rather than as a single incident. A disciplinary process is not automatically excluded from the workplace bullying definition, the court said; the circumstances must be assessed objectively.
The school board also challenged whether the plaintiff had suffered a psychiatric illness caused by the conduct. The Court of Appeal agreed with the President that there was evidence on which the trial judge could reach that conclusion.
The original High Court award was €255,276.39. The appeal succeeded on the future earnings component: the court held that the €47,000 award for future loss of earnings could not stand because no particularised claim for it had been made during the proceedings. It varied the damages to €208,276.39 and dismissed the appeal on the remaining issues.