United Kingdom Employment Appeal Tribunal

APPEARANCES

 

For the Appellant	THE APPELLANT IN PERSON


 


JUDGE WILSON: This has been the preliminary hearing of the proposed appeal by Ms Bilek-Sternberg against the decision of the Employment Tribunal to dismiss her applications against the respondents, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which concerned a number of matters. The Employment Tribunal found that the applicant was not entitled to a redundancy payment, that there had been no breach of contract of employment and no discrimination on the grounds of race.

1. The position was that the applicant had worked in Sion Manning Roman Catholic Girls' School in Kensington on a part-time basis. The issues for the tribunal were whether the School had dismissed her and if so whether she was entitled to a redundancy payment. Secondly, whether there was a term of her contract that she should work full-time hours when the number of pupils increased and when new technology became further developed, and if so whether that promise had been breached because she was not employed on a full-time basis. If there were such a breach the question would then arise whether the application was brought in time. Thirdly and finally, there was an issue of race discrimination whether the employer had unlawfully discriminated against her on grounds of her nationality and birth by the way in which she was treated during her employment.
2. The burden would have been upon the applicant to prove her case but as frequently happens in these cases, where there is an applicant in person, the tribunal looked at the matter and decided that it would be more helpful to the applicant and certainly to the tribunal, if the other side started first because the presentation of the issues would be in an orderly fashion which might not be the case with a litigant in person. Nevertheless, that was a decision which the applicant could not anticipate before the beginning of proceedings on the first day. Accordingly, she should have appeared at the tribunal ready to start her case, given her evidence and call her witnesses.
3. One of her complaints to us is that she was not given any opportunity to call her witnesses whom she had arranged to call the second day. We find that a difficult proposition to understand, but insofar as there is an indication in the letters to which she had referred us from Miss Williams and Mr Bennett, who she says would have been important witnesses for her, of what they would have said, it is difficult to see how they could have helped her case at all, as, indeed, was found by the Employment Tribunal.
4. So far as the Employment Tribunal is concerned, there was a written decision with extended reasons which occupied six pages of A4 typescript. The conclusions reached by the tribunal were that so far as the redundancy payment claim was concerned, there was no dismissal and the contract came to an end by the applicant's repudiation of it by not going to work on 1st September and the employer's acceptance of that position in a letter of 12th October. That being so, there was no constructive dismissal. Similarly, the tribunal found itself not satisfied that it had been a term of the applicant's contract of employment that she would work full-time hours in due course. They noted the vagueness of the alleged contingencies and the inherent improbability of such a term being incorporated in the oral contract of employment. They said that they were satisfied that no such term was part of the contract of employment. Finally, with regard to race discrimination, the Employment Tribunal found that the applicant had failed to show that the head teacher had behaved to her differently from the way in which she treated other members of staff.
5. With regard to that last and final complaint, the applicant has been at pains to say to us today that the discrimination that she was complaining about was discrimination against the sort of work she did. She claimed that the incoming new headmistress discriminated against her sort of resources abilities so as to make that job redundant and to create in its place two other jobs for neither of which the applicant was qualified. Insofar as the applicant complains about that as discrimination, it is not what is statutorily meant by discrimination. It is an area of School policy which no Court or tribunal would interfere with because it is entirely within the realm of the authority of the educationalists involved.
6. We find that there is nothing which would suggest that there is any prospect of success if this matter were proceed to full argument. Accordingly, the application must be dismissed now.