Head Teacher Wins in Muslim Pressure Case

(Surrey County, England) Influential Muslims put unrelenting pressure and demands on a school headmistress resulting in her suffering health problems. Courts have now ruled that the county council should pay for neglecting to intervene and protect her.

A headmistress forced from her job after a campaign by two Muslim governors to give Islam a greater presence in a state school is entitled to £400,000 damages, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

Erica Connor, 57, left the New Monument primary school in Woking, Surrey, because of stress after she was accused of Islamophobia.

A deputy High Court judge ruled in March last year that Surrey County Council had failed in its duty to protect her and to intervene when the actions of the governors created problems. He awarded her £407,700 damages.

The council had appealed against the ruling, claiming it was not liable in law and had not acted negligently in dealing with the problem.

Lord Justice Laws, giving a ruling on Thursday, said that Mrs Connor, who was promoted to head of the school in 1998, had suffered psychiatric damage and had to stop work in 2005 and retired a year later on ill-health grounds.

Lord Justice Sedley wrapped the case by stating that the Surrey County Council had erred by trying to compromise with the Muslim activists instead of protecting the school, its secular curricula, its staff and the headmistress.

“The picture that emerges from the careful and thorough [High Court] judgment is of a local education authority which had allowed itself to be intimidated by an aggressively conducted campaign to subvert the school’s legal status, a campaign which was plainly destabilising the school and placing the headteacher under intolerable pressure.”

I suggest the ruling was largely appropriate but it failed to point attention to the underlying impetus for the lawsuit -- Muslim ideologues applying harassing pressure on the public education system.