Court of Appeal in holiday pay for part year workers clarification

The Court of Appeal gave a ground-breaking judgment in Harpur Trust v Brazel & UNISON regarding the calculation of holiday pay for 'part year' workers last month.

Mrs Brazel was employed by The Harpur Trust as a part time music teacher. She was employed on a zero hours contract and worked mostly during term time. Her contract of employment entitled her to 5.6 weeks annual leave reflecting her statutory entitlement and she was obliged to take her holidays outside of term time. The Trust followed Acas guidance calculating holiday pay at 12.07% of her annualised hours for periods of annual leave, paid in three instalments at the end of each term. She complained that this was not correct and meant that she was being underpaid during her holiday periods.

The Pitfalls of Retrospectively Amending the Terms of Pension Schemes

In the recent case of BIC U.K. Limited v. Burgess [2019] EWCA Civ 806 ("BIC"), the Court of Appeal offered further clarity on the ability to retrospectively amend pension scheme rules. The Court of Appeal overturned the previous High Court decision finding that increases to pensions in payment in this instance had not been validly introduced.

Under many pension schemes, the rules expressly allow for retrospective amendment. However, in the absence of an express power, it is necessary to demonstrate the existence of an implied power if retrospective amendments are to be permitted. Any argument for the existence of a power must be constructed from the terms of the trust deed and rules, taking any restrictions on amendments into account.

EAT clarification on determining 'long-term' nature of a disability

In Nissa v. Waverly Education Foundation, the claimant, a science teacher, suffered from Fibromyalgia. She had suffered from the condition from December 2015, and resigned effective from 31 August 2016. She brought a claim for disability discrimination claiming her impairment caused her to suffer a substantial and long-term adverse effect on her ability to carry out day-today activities.

Data Protection Compliance in Education Establishments

After a well-earned summer break no doubt a myriad of issues require addressing by schools and establishments, with data protection compliance being amongst them. Returning back from any break brings about its own unique data protection challenges after a long period of reduced staffing as inevitably there will be a change in how the school normally operates.

Some of the chief concerns regarding data protection during the periods include how schools respond to time critical compliance requirements; namely responding to subject access requests (SARs) and data breaches. With this in mind, there have been developments for dealing with subject access requests as well as some key developments in post-GDPR data breach fines given out by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Change to Subject Access Request timescales

Following a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), there has been a change in how to interpret timescales for responding to a subject access request (SAR), as well as other individual rights requests.

Education Case Studies

Costs down the drain

The Dispute Resolution team at Forbes recently acted for an academy trust which had a vexatious claim issued against it by a neighbour. The neighbour's garden backed onto the school's playing field and he issued a claim for nuisance, alleging that his garden would flood on a regular basis due to a defect with an abandoned drainage system beneath the school playing fields, claiming for over £20,000 in damages.

On reviewing the claim, we noted that the Claimant had failed to supply any expert evidence to support his claim. Furthermore, the period in which the Claimant's garden was subject to significant flooding was during the time when the local area was extensively flooded and widely publicised in the national press. It was apparent that the claim had little merit, the academy had no responsibility for the flooding, and a robust defence was filed.