Personal injury compensations
15/04/2009

Work accident payouts for teachers

Figures released recently revealed that teachers claimed £18 million last year in work accident compensation, as well as for employment disputes and for criminal cases of attacks on teachers.

Teaching union leaders insisted that personal injury pay-outs were justified where schools and local authorities fail to keep staff safe, especially where an incident causes permanent injury.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said, "Millions of pounds of public money is being paid out to people who quite rightly deserve that compensation, but are for incidents that could have been preventable.

"Compensation is cold comfort if you end up mentally and physically ill for the rest of your life unable to do your chosen career."

There were around 500,000 compensation pay-outs reported by English teacher's unions, yet the scale of awards was down by £2m on the previous year.

However, critics once again blamed "compensation culture" after reports from the NUT that they brought 16 cases of slip and trip work accident compensation cases against schools who neglected to provide safe working conditions for their employees.