Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

Login Register Subscribe

'Failure to educate' claims increasing

Reprints

MANCHESTER, England-U.K. local education authorities face a growing risk of so-called "failure to educate" claims, particularly from individuals with learning disabilities, attorneys say.

Such suits generally claim that an individual's education suffered because educators failed to properly address certain learning needs, resulting, ultimately, in a reduction in the person's earning potential.

In many cases, these suits involve claimants with dyslexia, a learning disability that involves difficulty with reading and writing, said attorneys speaking at a session of the Assn. of Local Authority Risk Managers' recent conference in Manchester.

"Litigation in the education sphere is something of a growth industry," said Brian Goodwin, a partner at Berrymans Lace Mawer in Liverpool, England.

For example, a 2002 U.K. Court of Appeal ruling in Robinson vs. St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council determined that emotional and psychological damage resulting from a failure to ameliorate dyslexia is a personal injury, even though it falls short of psychiatric injury, Mr. Goodwin explained.

And awards for failure to address a student's dyslexia average £10,000 to £15,000 ($18,000 to $27,000) and can be higher, he noted.

But to succeed in failure to educate cases, claimants must prove that there was a breach of duty on the part of the local education authority, Mr. Goodwin explained. "It is not enough (for claimants) to say, `I could have been educated better,"' he said. The claimant must prove, for example, that the local education authority failed to take appropriate action to deal with a condition such as dyslexia, or failed to respond to reports of educational psychiatrists in an appropriate manner.

One challenge for local education authorities is that some claimants bring their cases many years after they have left the educational system, Mr. Goodwin told risk managers. "A lot of these claims are very old, which creates difficulties in investigating them," he said.

Schools may not have kept records that could prove helpful as risk managers works to mount their defenses, noted Roy Woollard, a solicitor at Berrymans Lace Mawer in Leeds, England, and a former school administrator.

It may also be difficult to get statements from the teachers involved with the education of the claimants, he said, particularly if they are now retired.

One good strategy a risk manager can use when seeking to defend against such a claim is to get a "generic picture" of the rest of the claimant's class. This may help to establish a defense if, for example, it can be shown that other members of the class were given access to extra support for dyslexia, he said.

In a separate conference session on trends in litigation against local authorities, John Morrell, a partner at the law firm of Weightman Vizards in London, said that courts tend to rule for local authorities in failure to educate cases.

And while it is possible for claimants to bring actions several years after they have left school, they must prove that they sought medical advice on their conditions within a reasonable amount of time, Mr. Morrell noted.

To illustrate that point, he cited a case, Adams vs. Bracknell Forest Borough Council, which was decided last month by the House of Lords, the United Kingdom's highest court.

The House of Lords ruled that the claimant, who was 30 years old when he brought his claim, could have been expected to have been curious about what caused his problems before then. His claim was refused on these grounds.