Teacher Kevin Lister's court case starts today on Tribunal Tweets

[Imnobody4]

Kevin Lister, a maths teacher of 20 years, is taking New College Swindon to an employment tribunal alleging he was fired for not affirming a student's preferred pronouns.

https://twitter.com/tribunaltweets/status/1770010705019711637?t=46yG9nCCclvIz5b4-iq4cg&s=19

It sounds as if he was tipping over into activism at work.

I wish Kevin the best of luck. His union should be backing him. It’s a disgrace that our unions are so ideologically captured that they oppose their own members’ interests.

Whether it would have been wise for him depends on the bigger picture. In order to win this case? Absolutely! As the saying goes: a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client. But he has to live beyond this case and the costs of counsel could bankrupt him regardless of a win. Remember how much many of these cases have cost.

But it is not helpful to others that he is not able to have his case properly presented.

A friend once went to tribunal (not employment) without a lawyer. I queried her about it as she could afford a lawyer, but she pointed out the lawyers fees would be more than the outcome she was after. Even if she lost, it would be cheaper to pay for what she was after than pay a lawyer.

Witness throwing in the possibility of student suicide if names / pronouns are not changed in the system.

This case really highlights the issue of there being no clear transgender guidance in schools. KL basically has basically pushed back on something (possibly clumsily) that he shouldn't ever have had to deal with. Honestly listening to the evidence "trans" is being used as a weapon against those of us who are non believers. Refusal to use "pronouns" has become the ultimate sin.

That does sound discriminatory

KL can't help making statements rather than asking questions.

Yep - KL: I'm going to make three comments on this... EJ: Please don't, Mr Lister...

This is where counsel would be so so useful, it must be next to impossible to sound impartial when you're representing yourself.

He is a hero

From the little I have heard him say and write, I hazard a guess that he is on the autistic spectrum, in which case he will find the rules about how he has to conduct himself in an ET very difficult. He presumably wants to use logic to argue that his views, and therefore his actions, are reasonable. If he is prevented from doing so, he may find it difficult to see another way of presenting his case.

I hope he asks if the training had any section on discrimination in relation to GC beliefs. If it didn't then it's biased training.

He's coming across a bit like that.

I had a very similar discussion with a friend yesterday. He believes that the people he's speaking to/about just haven't seen the evidence he has, and once they have, the scales will fall and they'll understand and recognise the validity of his position. But GI is not logic-based, it's all about the feelz.

It's such a shame that he doesn't have a lawyer representing him for such an important case. Should he really have been banned from teaching over this?

I have self represented in tribunals before - well, I was representing my husband.

If you self represent it is actually completely cost free to take an employer to court. Except for the time to prepare etc. Your employer even has to produce the bundles and get you a copy. In fact, employment tribunals are SUPPOSED to be fully accessible for people representing themselves, because the maximum amount of compensation available is usually not enough to pay the solicitors fees, as we have seen from previous cases!!

But it's gruelling, and galling. In my case, the judge was really rude and abrupt and seemed very impatient with me. My husbands ex employer bought a Bristol based barrister with a clerk, there were several witnesses and my husband only had me - it was a further extention of the bullying process, really, and it cost them a lot more to put us through it than it would have to settle.

Of course, your employer can also choose not to spend £££££s on barristers and either send a highly competent member of their HR team, or settle, instead. In most cases they do.

The whole process is rhubarb. Big companies don't have much fear of tribunal process because awards are so small. There should be other ways to get fair treatment from employers, if you ask me!!

Many big companies do have a real fear of losing in a tribunal. It is a question on a lot of invitations to tender and stating that you have lost an employment tribunal is an automatic disqualification.

No. It’s absurd that within such a short timeframe children are being supported by adults to wield such power over teachers who do not believe. It’s like what happened in the Cultural Revolution. This man has probably gone through his whole career without coming up against anything like this.

Wow that’s interesting

That’s quite tough though? It means you’re out of that market is it worth the risk?

They settle out of court and get the complainant to sign a NDA. Problem gone.

His ability or otherwise at representing himself shouldn’t really be under question here. The law isn’t just for the silver-tongued and the silver-wigged. The judge won’t want an appeal and will need to make sure that he is given exactly the same chance of success as someone represented by counsel.

It would be great if this were the case but sadly that’s not how life works. There’s a reason why people pay £££ for lawyers to represent them and it’s because they have a better chance of success. The judge can only assist to a degree. One of the issues today was that KL was spending far too much time with one witness repeating questions that had already been answered. Also making unnecessary statements that were of no value since he wasn’t the one giving evidence. The judge warned him that he would run out of time for other witnesses and that this could affect the outcome of his case.

Unfortunately while a judge is supposed to help a litigant in person they are biased against them from the start. And Kevin is not doing a good job of representing himself. He should be asking more questions about how the policies were drawn up, who delivered the training, pointing to this as an example of bias against gender critical views. and therefore impossible to have a fair disciplinary process. Instead he's basically just saying its obvious this was a safeguarding issue.

How can a lay person be expected to know the law to the same degree as a lawyer? To know of and understand appropriate precedents or even be able to search legal cases? To question a witness without training? To distance himself sufficiently from his own case to take a dispassionate view of the evidence?