An unfair dismissal case brought against Woodcote High School by a “superstar head teacher”, which claimed he was victim of race discrimination, has been dismissed.
Case dismissed: ‘super star’ head Paul Mundy-Castle lost his case for unfair dismissal
The case was brought by Paul Mundy-Castle, a former Great Britain basketball international and London’s Teacher of the Year in 2005, who from 2019 to 2021 was the head at the 1,200-pupil academy in Coulsdon.
The tribunal’s report said that Mundy-Castle’s “claims of direct race discrimination, race-related harassment, victimisation, whistleblowing detriment, automatically unfair dismissal (Section 103A Employment Rights Act 1996), unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal are not well-founded and are dismissed.”
Mundy-Castle was sacked as head of Woodcote High in July 2021 for gross misconduct over financial mismanagement. The school had initially brought 23 charges against him leading to the dismissal. Most of the claims were upheld by an independent appeal panel.
According to one parent who has followed the saga over the past four years, “He wasn’t on the take, but blew more money than the school could afford on changes and upgrades – which made him popular with the parents, but were unsustainable and driving the school into debt.”
Ramifications from Mundy-Castle’s time at the school have continued: in February this year, his successor as head, Kirstie Woodcock, resigned with immediate effect. Without offering any explanation, in a letter to parents she described her decision as “bittersweet”, after 16 years working at the school.
Unconvinced: Employment Judge Stephen Heath
In the 102-page ruling from Employment Judge Stephen Heath, the evidence given by Mundy-Castle is repeatedly dismissed and its reliability doubted. “We found the claimant’s evidence unsatisfactory in a number of respects,” the judge said.
In one example discussed in evidence, a film company, Doc Hearts, was hired by the school to do some filming for promotional social media posts. Doc Hearts was part-owned by a relative of Mundy-Castle. “We find that the evidence the claimant gave to the tribunal, that others took the decision to engage Doc Hearts, was not true.”
Mundy-Castle will have been under oath when giving evidence at the tribunal.
The hearing lasted 10 days, in public and in private, over June and August (sports fan Mundy-Castle was in Paris during the Olympics in July). The ruling’s publication was delayed until this week while some corrections and amendments were made.
“The claimant, a black man, says that he was unreasonably taken through a flawed disciplinary process which led to his dismissal from his post as head teacher…,” Employment Judge Heath’s findings begin.
“He says his harsh treatment was in stark contrast to the lenient treatment meted out to various white colleagues who had committed misconduct. He says the disciplinary process and dismissal (and certain other acts) were acts of racial discrimination or race-related
harassment, victimisation for having raised certain equality-related issues; that his suspension was a detriment for having made protected disclosures, and that his dismissal was automatically unfair following his whistleblowing.
“He makes an ‘ordinary’ unfair dismissal claim also, asserting that he has two years continuous service.”
In its defence, lawyers for Woodcote High submitted that Mundy-Castle “committed acts of gross misconduct, largely relating to financial irregularities”.
The judgement document says that Woodcote “accepts that the claimant raised certain equalities issues, but does not accept that he was a whistleblower. It says that the comparisons with other staff the claimant seeks to make are not genuinely comparable.
“It says that it disciplined the claimant and dismissed him solely because of misconduct following a fair procedure, and that equalities complaints, disclosures of information and the claimant’s race were in no sense factors in its decision-making.
“It says it dismissed the claimant before he acquired two years’ service, but that in any event the dismissal was a fair one.”
Further into the findings of the tribunal, it states that Mundy-Castle, “presents himself as a ‘superstar head teacher’ with an ‘impeccable record’ before his employment with the respondent [Woodcote]”.
But the tribunal, in typically understated legal style, adds: “We would observe that, together with reliability issues… the picture is probably more complex.”
The judgement shows that even before his formal first day in post, Mundy-Castle approached the governors for an increase to his £105,000 salary – which they agreed to a few months later.
Separately, just a couple of months into the job, the new head was signing off spending for amounts almost twice as much as he was authorised to do without prior approval from the governors.
There were other areas of dispute between Mundy-Castle and the governors, such as a safeguarding issue involving a member of staff and a pupil at the school in his first term. Mundy-Castle’s evidence, the judge ruled, did not match his email correspondence from the time: “We find that the narrative presented by the claimant in these proceedings is substantially at odds with the contemporaneous documentation, and we do not accept it as accurate.”
When, in early 2020, Mundy-Castle agreed to spending of £38,000 on wi-fi facilities at the school over three years, he informed the governors that the amount being spent was £25,000. “We find that the claimant was presenting information to the governors that he must have known was incorrect,” the judge said.
Then, at the end of February 2020, the governors received an email from an anonymous whistleblower, expressing concerns about the head teacher’s financial management. “Money is being spent like it is going out of fashion,” the email said.
“Links with companies that he [Mundy-Castle] has previously dealt with have come straight to Woodcote High School… the governors are not being shown the correct budget for what is being spent, everything is going through a third-party company for financing and then being paid like a loan.
“Should this not be going through the governors?”
Game plan: Mundy-Castle is a former British basketball international
In other correspondence at around that time, one governor, with professional accountancy experience, expressed reservations, saying that “the school was paying for a consultant who did not understand how to prepare management accounts or cash flows”.
Correspondence between Mundy-Castle and the governors showed that the relationship had begun to fray within the first few months of his taking up the appointment. “If you look at my track record I am not shy in moving on from schools where my vision and energy [are] not aligned to the organisation,” the head wrote in one testy email to the governors.
Covid lockdown as Woodcote approaches a crisis point
The financial limits applied were clearly an issue for him, as he claimed that it was preventing him from getting on with his job: “… constant reference to governors a £25k [spending] limit in this day and age with the whole budget of over £7.5million is ineffective and obstructive”.
A few days later, on March 23, 2020, the government put the country into covid lockdown.
On the same day, the Woodcote governors held an extraordinary general meeting. Their relationship with Mundy-Castle, who they had appointed less than a year before, was also approaching a crisis point.
Hiten Savla, one of the governors, told the meeting, “Money is going out with no clear
guidance or authorisation structure; it seems whimsical… There is great frustration – we
are requesting information but nothing is coming through other than ‘trust me’…
“To carry the board with him the head must give information, otherwise it makes life difficult.”
Savla said that the school’s cashflow situation “really scares me”, and he warned that the school might even run out of money. Concerns were raised over whether Croydon Council would make funding payments to the school on time.
The court’s ruling states: “A[nother] governor commented that, ‘He has threatened to leave twice – if we do not agree to what he wants, he threatens to leave’.”
And the following month, Mundy-Castle was threatening to leave again, unless the governors agreed to a series of requests around the school’s financial management. The judgement report states: “He explained that he had been approached by another trust to come for an interview on Wednesday with a view to taking on the leadership of three secondary schools with a significant uplift in salary.
Under pressure: the strains have been felt by staff, pupils and governors at Woodcote High for four years
“He said it could have been his intention to commit to the school but felt that the current constraints on his current role meant that the role might be for someone else.
“He set out that in order to stay at school and not go to the interview they would have to respond to a number of requests which included rewriting the restricted schemes of delegation, including head teacher’s, allowing him to deliver on his vision for the school, changing the governance model of the school and other matters.
“He pointed out that leaving the school after one year meant he ‘was a disaster or committed some high crime or misdemeanour and as you all know this is not the case. I will protect my reputation if I move on so I will not allow rumours to fill the void and I am happy to agree an exit strategy with the governors if the general consensus is that I should move on’.” He did not.
By September 2020, Mundy-Castle “was taking advice from his union as he felt that he was not trusted and that the governors had lost confidence in his leadership. He said he was losing sleep and had been caused a lot of stress for which he would be seeking medical support”.
A month later, Mundy-Castle submitted a formal grievance to the governors, raising a range of issues: “I need to feel that my colour is not the reason why there is so much distrust of me,” he wrote.
At the beginning of November, the tribunal report says that a member of staff who was about the leave the school submitted to the governors a detailed complaint raising 27 different instances “of alleged wrongdoing”. One of these complaints was an instance where the staff member had been tasked by Mundy-Castle to check what correspondence governors had been sending from their school email addresses.
The tribunal’s ruling states: “Again, this issue must be seen in context. We have set out what is quite obviously a seriously deteriorating relationship between the claimant and the remaining governors. The claimant had on more than one occasion referred to leaving with an exit package, and the governors had articulated numerous concerns which they have observed or had brought to their attention.
“We find that the governors were losing trust in the claimant by this stage. When trust goes, a degree of suspicion, or even paranoia, is understandable. We can understand how, faced with information from someone with considerable information technology experience (which [the departing staff member] had), that the claimant was seeking to look at governors’ emails, that they may have wished to discuss these very sensitive issues secure in the knowledge that there was no ‘eavesdropping’.”
The judge describes the governors’ conduct, using private emails to communicate, as “entirely understandable”.
His day in court: Mundy-Castle has been unusually quiet about his case since the ruling was published
It was at this point, in November 2020, that the governors called in their lawyers. “Following legal advice, consideration was given as to whether to suspend the claimant to facilitate the investigation if it was felt that this would allow a fair investigation and protecting information and staff.”
After a brief meeting at the school on November 18, 2020, Mundy-Castle was formally suspended. In his witness statement, he says that he was “frogmarched out of the school like a criminal”.
In his suspension letter, Mundy-Castle was given a litany of issues which had led to the decision, including “negligence in relation to and serious financial mismanagement relating to approval and authorisation of leases… failing to disclose financial information when repeatedly asked to provide it, failing to disclose personal relationships with external companies, and serious and repeated failure to comply with reasonable management instructions”.
Mundy-Castle, after a period signed off from work by his GP, responded to the claims against him in a series of emails, and a renewed grievance procedure.
In these, he raised the matter of a Section 47 enquiry at the school – to decide whether action is required to safeguard a child who is suspected of, or likely to be, suffering significant harm – as well as complaints of racist comments on a school Facebook page (of which governors were among the members), plus safeguarding issues relating to the employment of a teaching assistant who had been previously arrested, and his discovery of a staff member being involved in a pornographic website.
The disciplinary process was long and drawn out, in part because of Mundy-Castle’s ill-health, including depression, anxiety and self-isolation because of covid. With a final disciplinary date set for late July, Mundy-Castle tendered his resignation, stating he would be unavailable for any hearings over the summer as he was going to Nigeria, as his GP had suggested that he needed a complete break.
School officials suspected that Mundy-Castle might withdraw his resignation, or use it to build a case for constructive dismissal. The governors decided to go ahead with the disciplinary hearing.
The tribunal ruling notes that the disciplinary hearing date “was moved at [Mundy-Castle’s] request because he attended a court hearing on that day in the family courts.
“The claimant accepted in cross-examination that this was an in-person hearing, which he attended, and that he did not apply to postpone for medical, self-isolation or other reasons.”
Mundy-Castle had also, in the meantime, set up a new business, appeared on webinars and continued to be active on social media.
Case closed: the South London Employment Tribunal, based in Croydon, finished its hearings for this case in August, but has only just published its full findings
In his absence, the disciplinary panel decided to uphold all allegations of misconduct against Mundy-Castle On July 23, 2021, the school’s solicitors emailed Mundy-Castle’s union rep with a without prejudice offer of settlement. Munday-Castle rejected the settlement and sought to withdraw his resignation. A week later, the decision to dismiss Munday-Castle was confirmed in writing.
In the judge’s ruling, Mundy-Castle’s claims of racially prejudiced discrimination, harassment and victimisation are all dismissed. “There is nothing from which we could conclude that the claimant’s race was a factor in how his grievance was dealt with,” the judgement says.
“The reason why the respondent [the school] took as long as it did to deal with the claimant’s grievance were a complex set of factors… We find that someone in the same material circumstances as the claimant but of a different race would have had their grievance dealt with in exactly the same way. There is nothing from which we could conclude otherwise…
“In the circumstances, we do not uphold these complaints.”
The school issued a statement last month, soon after they received notification of the judgement in which they said that they are “delighted” that the Employment Tribunal “had dismissed all claims made against the school by ex-head teacher Paul Mundy-Castle”.
And they added, “We wish Mr Mundy-Castle all the best for the future.”
For his part, Mundy-Castle has been unusually quiet on social media since the tribunal reached its decision. But at the conclusion of the hearing, he did post this: “The tribunal has ended and I have spoken my truth. Lots of lessons learnt and lots of lessons to share in due course…
“… Having my day in court was worth turning down a settlement agreement from Woodcote High School…
“I will now take time to heal but I am emboldened by the experience so thank you all for your support over the four years. As a community we will use this experience to develop a support network so that we don’t carry on suffering in silence.”
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I find it amazing that the Tribunal did not find that the School’s legal costs should have been paid by Mundy-Castle with the evidence of every trick being played in the book provided in the information here. What do you need to do demonstrate serious misconduct in office these days?
Paul’s LinkedIn profile is a laugh.
That is, until you read that he is the Chair of the External Reference Group of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime.
Sadiq Khan should now review Mundy-Castle’s position in the light of the evidence given at the Employment Tribunal hearing. In particular, how he handled public money and how his claims of being a victim of race discrimination were so swiftly dismissed by the Judge. Because if Sadiq doesn’t, Assembly Members will
Brilliant, detailed piece – very much in the public interest, thanks. Why, oh why wasn’t this picked up by the nationals?