new employer gone bust - what to do now?

[taylorswift1989]

I just started a job only to be told that the company has gone bust and the administrators are taking over on Monday. I'm not sure what the chances are of being compensated for my broken contract. Anyone have advice on what I should do? It was a residential summer teaching job.

They might try to sell it as a going concern and continue operating. Otherwise you join a list of creditors and suspect fairly low priority.

Ring ACAS, they should be able to advise you.
Best of luck.

Thanks. They're definitely not going to keep operating as a school. The bank wants to sell the buildings. I've been sent away and others have been told not to turn up at all.

The bank might want to sell the buildings, but it will be the administrator's job to realise the best possible outcome for all the creditors, and that may well include selling the business as a whole to another organisation which would continue to trade as a going concern. It is rather short notice though, and I can't see that happening any time soon. When was your contract start date, and how long before that were you actually formally offered the job?

Whether you can recover any compensation rather depends on the actual date the business legally enters administration. If it is next Monday, then you have just enough time to put in a claim for compensation before that happens and they close the books. You would then be included on the list of creditors. If that date has passed and they have already gone into administration, then you have no chance, other than to sue the directors personally for misrepresentation and misleading you when they must have known what was about to happen.

Find out as much as you can by looking up the business on the Companies House website, which may not yet have the official notice of going into administration yet, but it will have prior sets of accounts and the names of directors etc on the public record. You can then look at the directors and see whether they have interests in any other businesses as well.

My contract start date is tomorrow. It was signed about a month ago. I travelled to the school a couple of days early to set up. Yesterday the summer school director told me the school is cancelled and the administrators are taking over on Monday. I left this morning. I haven’t had anything in writing yet.