Employment Appeal Tribunal rules that a tribunal should have considered the effect of coercive control when assessing whether the claimant’s conduct justified dismissal.

A schoolteacher who was sacked for sending an under-18 pupil a sexually inappropriate message has won her appeal in Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT), with Judge James Tayler holding that an employment tribunal wrongly treated pressure or “duress” as irrelevant to whether her conduct amounted to gross misconduct justifying summary dismissal. In his judgment handed down on 15 June, the judge remitted the wrongful dismissal issue to the same employment tribunal, ruling that the tribunal should have taken account of the circumstances under which the claimant acted when determining whether her conduct was sufficiently serious to constitute a repudiatory breach of contract.

The claimant, anonymised as XX, had worked for the respondent school, YY, since September 2014 and had shortly before the relevant events been promoted to assistant head teacher. Between about mid-2015 and August 2018, she was in what was accepted to have been a coercive and controlling relationship.

In about mid-2016 she sent a message to a boy she believed to be under 18, asking, “are you a virgin”. The respondent maintained that she had sent the message under extreme pressure, fearing that she or her children would be at risk of serious harm if she did not.

The claimant did not report the message for around 18 months, with the matter...

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