Schools must tackle stress levels among staff as the number of claims made by teachers has risen by 240% over the past five years, warned Zurich Municipal.
It said the number of claims made by teachers for stress in 2003 jumped by 41% compared with the previous year.
Zurich Municipal said that while its figures showed that stress claims made against the public sector had declined over the past five years, the problem of stress claims was worsening in the education sector.
Zurich Municipal technical claims manager Alan Hunter said: “The public sector has been tackling the issue of stress related claims and is making serious inroads. However, the problem remains, as workload pressures increase.
“It is not enough for schools to simply have a policy on dealing with stress. Unless the procedures in place actually work, local education authorities stand little chance of successfully defending claims against them in court. Effective measures must be in place to manage staff stress levels.
“Schools are facing a wide variety of liability issues and stress is just one of them. Problems such as failure to educate, trips and slips also hit the school purse, but school arson is still the most costly danger.”
The main causes of psychological injuries suffered by teachers were workload overload, disruptive or violent students and interpersonal conflicts, said the insurer.
The law states that employers are responsible for stress suffered by their employees if the problem is ‘reasonably foreseeable', depending on the employer's knowledge of their staff. Employers are only in breach of their duty if they fail to take the necessary steps to prevent harm to their staff.
Schools unable to prove they took adequate steps further to a member of staff's complaint would find it difficult to defend any claim, it warned.
