THE dismissal of a college employee for social-media posts about problems with gender and sexuality was not proportionate and amounted to illegal direct discrimination, the Court of Appeal has ruled.
Kristie Higgs was dismissed from her position as pastoral administrator and work-experience manager at Farmor’s School, Fairford, in Gloucestershire, in 2019, after posts that she had written on Facebook the previous 12 months were delivered to the varsity’s attention.
Mrs Higgs’s posts included assertions that proposals to show children about LGBTQ relationships in sex-education lessons amounted to “brainwashing”, and that “expressing and teaching fundamental Christian beliefs, regarding the creation of men and girls and marriage, will in practice grow to be forbidden”. In one other post, she had described the concept of gender fluidity as a “perverted vision”.
In 2020, an employment tribunal ruled that Mrs Higgs had been lawfully dismissed, as the choice had been made on the premise of her use of social media reasonably than as regards to her religious beliefs (News, 30 October 2020).
In 2023, the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) ruled in her favour, but ordered a recent tribunal to reconsider the case (News, 20 June 2023). The judgment made reference to an intervention by the Archbishops’ Council, which pointed to the “Pastoral Principles” on “disagreeing well” within the Church of England.
In a two-day hearing within the Court of Appeal Civil Division last October, Mrs Higgs challenged the EAT’s decision to order a fresh tribunal, which her lawyers said was “unnecessary” (News, 11 October 2024).
In a judgment handed down remotely on Wednesday, Lord Justice Underhill, sitting with Lord Justice Bean and Lady Justice Falk, ruled that the EAT had been flawed to order a recent tribunal, and that Mrs Higgs’s dismissal “constituted illegal discrimination on the bottom of faith or belief”.
The ruling said that, under the Equality Act, an worker couldn’t be dismissed merely for expressing a spiritual belief to which an employer objects. “However, if the dismissal is motivated not just by the expression of the idea itself . . . but by something objectionable in the way in which during which it was expressed, determined objectively, then . . . the dismissal will likely be lawful if, but provided that, the employer shows that it was a proportionate response to the objectionable feature — briefly, that it was objectively justified.”
The school had sought to justify Mrs Higgs’s dismissal, the ruling said, on the premise that her social-media posts “were intemperately expressed and included insulting references to the promoters of gender fluidity and ‘the LGBT crowd’ which were liable to wreck the varsity’s status locally. . .
“However, neither the language of the posts nor the chance of reputational damage were able to justifying the Claimant’s dismissal in circumstances where she had not said anything of the type at work or displayed any discriminatory attitudes in her treatment of pupils.”
Responding to the ruling, Mrs Higgs said in an announcement: “Expressing biblical Christian teaching on gender and sexuality may seem like offensive to those that hold the alternative views, but as today’s judgment signals, Christians have a right to precise their beliefs publicly.”
Writing on the web site of Schools Week, Joanne Moseley, a practice development lawyer at Irwin Mitchell, wrote: “This judgment makes it clear that robust speech is protected as a manifestation of a spiritual or philosophical belief. Employers will only give you the option to take motion for something an worker has said whether it is objectionably inappropriate.”
