A school manager at The Oak Trust in Oldham, Lancashire, who lost her job days before she was eligible for her pension, has won an age discrimination and unfair dismissal case.
Suzanne Millar started working as a school business manager at Fir Bank Primary School, which is owned by the trust, in 2004 after moving from a different role at a linked college in Oldham, where she had worked since 1996.
A Manchester employment tribunal heard that a review was carried out in March 2021 about existing roles given school administration changes, which resulted in Millar being made redundant. She was told that she was not entitled to a strain payment of between £25,000 and £32,000 from the school under the Local Government Pension Scheme, because she was under 55.
Millar requested her redundancy date of 31 August to be delayed until after her 55th birthday on 18 September during a meeting in May that year, but was denied. She also asked several questions regarding redundancy termination as well as notice period, the amount of redundancy pay and her pension. Following this, Millar went off sick due to stress.
Her appeal against the decision was dismissed in June due to the trust believing it would be failing in its duty as a guardian of the public purse if it manipulated a timeline for Millar’s financial self-gain.
A hearing will now take place to decide how much compensation she will receive after winning the case at the employment tribunal.
Employment judge Joanne Dunlop said: “The proposed timetable shows that the procedural safeguards of the trust’s own policy were to be jettisoned in favour of an accelerated process. We feel satisfied that if the trust’s focus had been on offering a fair and genuine process, and not on meeting the artificial deadline, there would have been a significant extension to the process involving Millar, and that the act of giving her notice of dismissal would have been delayed by, on our best estimate, around six weeks.
“Millar’s 55th birthday was the key moment, had she already reached that milestone or had she been comfortably younger than it, we are satisfied that many of the errors in this process would have been avoided or corrected. We find that the failure to re-start the process was an act of discrimination on the grounds of age.”
The Oak Trust was contacted for comment prior to publication.