How appropriate that your article 'School's Out' (see [2007] Gazette, 2 August, 12) should appear two days after I had finished sitting in Mold Crown Court with clients whose son died in an accident at school.


The hearing was a Health & Safety Executive prosecution against the head teacher of the private school attended by the deceased. The deceased was a three-year-old boy who had jumped on some stairs which were adjacent to the play area for the kindergarten pupils. The stairs were not fenced off from the playground and the supervision consisted of one teacher to 59 pupils (12 of whom were aged about three or four), who herself left the playground for '30 seconds' to show a visitor to the staff room. The headmaster was convicted by a jury of health and safety breaches relating to the death.



No school can consider itself beyond the law, whether criminal, health and safety or civil. To suggest that it is inappropriate in any case to sue a school is quite unreasonable. No self-respecting claimant firm will prosecute a case they know has no proper prospects of success - this is not in the interests of any of the parties. Similarly, cases without merit which relate to any aspect of a school's life, such as holidays or school trips or adventurous play, will be considered against a background of what is reasonable.



What is reasonable will include whether the activities have been properly risk assessed. If they have, the school has nothing to fear and the case may well be a 'pure accident'. However, as the above case shows, this is not always the case. Sometimes it is not possible to know whether there has been proper risk assessment without pre-action disclosure. To apply for this is not just a cynical costs-generating exercise, as Henry Bermingham suggests. Costs are not even payable to claimants if the disclosure is produced properly in accordance with the protocol.



Lawyers are canny enough to appreciate the mood of judges and the public. We have been known to refuse to take a case if we think it is one that, frankly, is not politically attractive to a court, either because the injury is trivial or because the circumstances are such that the sympathy of the court will be with the school or local authority.



I was at a recent meeting of the Law Society at which both claimant and defendant firms were represented. Many of the defendants there were surprised to hear that claimant firms discontinue or do not pursue a considerable proportion of cases that are investigated. This varied between 20% and 30% of all cases referred to us. We have a duty to investigate if it is a case which appears to have some merit and we have an equal duty to discontinue that case if the investigations suggest there is no merit.



To suggest that a case against a school should not even be investigated is wrong, and most well-run schools have nothing to fear from the present system.



Catherine Leech, Pannone, Manchester