High Court dismissed Bristol University appeal in Natasha Abrahart case
Bob and Maggie Abrahart read out a statement outside the High Court
Today a high court released it’s judgement on an appeal by the University of Bristol involving the family of Natasha Abrahart who are members of ForThe100, a decision which has also been awaited for it’s potential relevance to Statutory Duty of Care in Higher Education. A press release about the case can be read here.
Natasha’s parents read out a statement today which included the following:
“It was, frankly, beyond belief for the University to mischaracterise a court judgment, that it had unlawfully contributed to the death of one of its students, as merely a finding that “the adjustments made by the University … were insufficient”. As if it had engaged in some trivial technical breach. As if our daughter’s death was something to be explained away. As if our pain was an inconvenient distraction from the business, and it is a business, of attracting students and funders. Shame on you!”
Natasha Abrahart
“Do Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and the other party leaders really think universities should be allowed to harm to their students by acting without reasonable care and skill? If they don’t believe this, then prove it. Put a statutory duty of care for universities in your manifestos, or explain to the voters why you think that some students should be protected and others not.”
Full statement as read out by Natasha’s parents:
Bob
Thank you all for coming.
Today, Mr Justice Linden, a High Court judge, has comprehensively rejected the University of Bristol’s appeal against a previous County Court finding, that it contributed to our daughter’s death by unlawfully discriminating against her. Each one of the University’s seven grounds of appeal – as expected – failed. They had no real argument.
Importantly, it also means that there is now a legally binding precedent, setting out how and when Higher Education institutions should adjust their methods of assessment to avoid discriminating against disabled students, regardless of whether a student has completed the right form, or ticked the right box.
Let’s recap….. How did we get to this point.
Natasha, our much-loved daughter, died on the 30th April, 2018, aged 20. She came to Bristol to study physics, the subject she loved. She would have made an excellent physicist if only she hadn’t been failed so appallingly.
Natasha was bright, diligent, hardworking, and disabled. She suffered from what was described in an internal University record created months before her death as a “genuine case” of social anxiety. Social anxiety disorder is described by NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) as a “persistent fear of or anxiety about one or more social or performance situations … Typical situations that might be anxiety-provoking include … talking in meetings or in groups, starting conversations, talking to authority figures… and public performances such as public speaking. Although worries about some of these situations are common in the general population, people with social anxiety disorder worry excessively about them at the time and before and afterwards.”
Social anxiety disorder is situation specific. Natasha’s social anxiety did not stop her from enjoying life when she could. She had a small but close group of friends and a loving boyfriend. She was successful academically, achieving As and A*s at A-Level, apart from one B (which she gave herself a hard time about). She passed her first year at university with good marks.
It was in her second year, when she was required to take the University’s ‘Practical Physics 203’ module, that things started to go wrong. The module was assessed partly by way of two forms of oral assessment: five post-laboratory interviews, each following the completion of a practical experiment, and, on the day of her death, a laboratory conference presentation to other students and academics in a very large lecture theatre. Expecting Natasha to do these assessments was like expecting somebody who is afraid of spiders, to willingly enter a room that is full of spiders. And not just small spiders. Huge terrifying tarantulas! They would have been truly terrifying situations for anyone with her disability.
Internal University records and correspondence refer to staff being unable to get Natasha “to say anything at all” during the oral assessments, to her having “a problem with what looks like panic and anxiety issues with the interview assessment format” and finding it “very difficult coping with an interview situation”. The University also received other worrying information. Her friend and flatmate told a member of staff that Natasha was “self-harming” and had been “cutting herself”. That same staff member received an email from Natasha saying “I’ve been having suicidal thoughts and to a certain degree attempted it.” And what did the University do with this information? As good as nothing. The disability service sent her one fact finding email and, when she was inevitably unable to respond, did nothing further. The member of staff who knew about her self-harming and suicidality failed to, in the words of Mr Justice Linden, “draw the attention of key people to the seriousness of Ms Abrahart’s situation, with or without her consent, and for immediate action to be taken to remove the pressure of the forthcoming laboratory interviews and conference from her shoulders.” When Natasha couldn’t jump through the hoops, which the University had designed, or access their support services, neither process having taken her type of disability into account, it simply watched as she limped through failure after failure, becoming more and more desperate for somebody to help her. Again to quote Mr Justice Liden, there was “nothing surprising” in the County Court’s finding that once Natasha was unable to follow the institution’s preferred procedures for requesting adjustments to assessments “the University seemed to stall in its consideration of reasonable adjustments ”. As he says, “the problem with the University’s reliance on its own Regulations and policies… was that they are not the law. They were subject to the law, including the requirements of the Equality Act 2010.” It was that Act, which the University repeatedly broke when it discriminated against our daughter, and caused the significant psychological distress which led to her death.
I would like to repeat something we said when we stood on these very steps, outside the court building, on 20 May 2022 after the County Court handed down its judgment:
“… we do not seek to blame any individual member of staff. It is clear that some of them have been deeply affected by Natasha’s death and obviously no member of staff wanted her to come to harm. We do however blame the University as an institution. We blame the University for not training its staff properly in its duties towards disabled students and on when they could share information internally about students being at risk of suicide. We blame the University for maintaining a system that was so inflexible that it exposed our daughter to suffering which the judge described as “serious and, from what I have seen in the evidence, continuous”. We blame the University for arguing that there was no “legal or factual basis for intensive scrutiny” of its role in Natasha’s death at the inquest and for accusing us of pursuing “spurious claims”. And we blame the University for the role it played our daughter’s death.”
Six year’s after Natasha’s death, I am sad to report that this list must now be expanded. Today we also blame the University for making inappropriate public statements, issued following the judgment that it has today failed to overturn. It was, frankly, beyond belief for the University to mischaracterise a court judgment, that it had unlawfully contributed to the death of one of its students, as merely a finding that “the adjustments made by the University … were insufficient”. As if it had engaged in some trivial technical breach. As if our daughter’s death was something to be explained away. As if our pain was an inconvenient distraction from the business, and it is a business, of attracting students and funders. Shame on you!
In their October 2022 press release, the University stated that “this appeal is not against the Abrahart family”, rubbish, as if we were not the ones who had held them to account in the first place. And finally, how dare they suggest, after someone has died, that complying with the law, or making the obvious adjustments which our daughter needed, would place “a major additional burden on staff”. Shame on you!
Maggie
I would like to speak directly to Professor Evelyn Welch, the vice chancellor of the University of Bristol. It is time to stop this. Don’t instruct your lawyers to pursue another pointless appeal. Don’t delay any longer. Please stop your PR machine from issuing another press release about how the University would “once again like to extend our sympathies to [Natasha’s] friends and family.” We don’t need, or want, your sympathy. We want action. We want you to read this judgment very carefully and follow its lessons. We want you to think how you would wish your son or daughter to be treated at university if they were disabled and needed their rights protecting. We are still willing to sit down with you. Listen to what we have to say. And finally, at last, five years and nine months after Natasha’s death, say sorry to us. We’re waiting.
With us today we have other members of ForThe100. Families of students who have been harmed by the universities they attended, and who in some cases died. Together, we have been campaigning for Parliament to pass a statutory duty of care, requiring all universities to act with reasonable care and skill so as to avoid causing harm to students. This would extend legal protections for students beyond the Equality Act, as it would not require a student, or their family following their death, to prove that they were disabled. 128,000 people signed a petition calling for a statutory duty of care. The Government kicked the issue into the long grass. We therefore hoped that this judgment would be a way of achieving the same outcome, a clear judicial statement that such a duty exists. So we are of course disappointed that Mr Justice Linden, for a technical legal reason, concluded it was not necessary to rule one way or the other on whether the University owed Natasha a common law duty of care in addition to duties under the Equality Act. If the University try to take this case to the Court of Appeal then we may revisit the issue of a common law, or ‘judge-made’, duty of care. However, for now, our focus, and the focus of the other families who we are proud to stand alongside, will now shift back to Parliament, and to the fight for a statutory duty of care which protects all students regardless of their ability to fit within the framework of the Equality Act.
As we all know, there is an election coming up, and the parties are drafting their manifestos. Do Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and the other party leaders really think universities should be allowed to harm to their students by acting without reasonable care and skill? If they don’t believe this, then prove it. Put a statutory duty of care for universities in your manifestos, or explain to the voters why you think that some students should be protected and others not.
Finally, we would like to thank our family and friends who have supported us over the last six years, the brave former students who gave evidence to the court despite still living with the trauma of Natasha’s death, the 900 people who contributed to our crowdfunding campaign for legal costs, the charity INQUEST who helped us at the start of our journey and have been helping in the background ever since, the 128,000 registered voters who signed our petition calling for a statutory duty of care, and to the journalists who have now covered Natasha’s case over many years. Special mention should also be made of our hugely supportive and committed legal team. There are too many to thank individually, but we are particularly indebted to Gus Silverman, Sarah Steinhardt and Jamie Burton KC. They have been outstanding.
We loved Natasha dearly. We will always love her. And it is heart-breaking that our exceptional daughter, who gave us so much joy, and had so much more to offer the world, was failed so badly and suffered such unnecessary torment.
Natasha only had one standard. To do her best. Now is the time for university managers to match her standard, by delivering what is both necessary and expected.
Maggie and Bob Abrahart