Barber v Somerset County Council [2004] HL

Saturday 3 April 2004 at 3:16 pm | In News | 2 Comments

[Tort – negligence – duty of care – overworked schoolteacher – duty owed when problem known or should have been known]
D the council which employed C a 52 year old schoolteacher as head of mathematics in a comprehensive school. He worked long hours about which he complained of ‘work overload’. Following a period of sickness because he was ‘overstressed/depression’ he suffered a mental breakdown at school.

Held: The school owed C a duty of care, and their breach of that caused the claimant’s nervous breakdown. The employer’s duty to take some action arose when the claimant saw separately each member of the school’s senior management team. It continued so long as nothing was done to help the claimant. The senior management team should have made inquiries about his problems and seen what they could have done to ease them, instead of brushing him off unsympathetically or sympathising but simply telling him to prioritise his work. Stokes v Guest, Keen and Nettlefold (Bolts and Nuts) Ltd [1968] applied.

C won

Whole case here

2 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. very useful collection of information that will be handy for revision/legal updates with AS groups after Easter. Surely the case name for the stressed teacher is an error?

    Comment by elizabeth matthews — Wednesday 7 April 2004 1:28 pm #

  2. The case was reported on 1st of April, but that has nothing to do with the error!!
    Many thanks, Elizabeth, for pointing it out. What a blunder, wrong year wrong case. Goodness knows how that happened, but I have fixed it now.
    I really do appreciate it when people make the effort to point out mistakes, I never make them intentionally, I promise.

    Comment by Mike — Wednesday 7 April 2004 6:10 pm #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress with Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^