{"id":86,"date":"2004-04-03T15:16:20","date_gmt":"2004-04-03T15:16:20","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-04-03T15:16:20","modified_gmt":"2004-04-03T15:16:20","slug":"barber-v-somerset-county-council-2004-hl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"Barber v Somerset County Council [2004] HL"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>[Tort \u2013 negligence \u2013 duty of care \u2013 overworked schoolteacher \u2013 duty owed when problem known or should have been known]<\/strong> <br \/>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 &#8216;work overload&#8217;. Following a period of sickness because he was &#8216;overstressed\/depression&#8217; he suffered a mental breakdown at school. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Held<\/strong>: The school owed C a duty of care, and their breach of that caused the claimant&#8217;s nervous breakdown. The employer&#8217;s duty to take some action arose when the claimant saw separately each member of the school&#8217;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. <\/p>\n<p><strong>C won<\/strong> <\/p>\n<p>Whole case <a href=\"http:\/\/www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk\/pa\/ld200304\/ldjudgmt\/jd040401\/barber-1.htm\">here <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Tort \u2013 negligence \u2013 duty of care \u2013 overworked schoolteacher \u2013 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 &#8216;work overload&#8217;. Following a period of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/lawblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}