When a lack of familiarity and structure resulted in an unnecessarily risky warm-up.
What happened?
An eleven year-old girl was one of twenty five girls taking part in their first PE lesson at a new school. As a warm-up, the PE teacher instructed the girls to touch all four walls of the sports hall and then return to her. It was implicit that the girls should run.
There was no order or sequence to the activity, and it was up to each girl to select which walls to run to, so they were criss-crossing each other. It was a new school for the girls, most didn’t know each other, and it was the first time they had been in the sports hall, indeed the injured girl had never been in a sports hall so big. The girls were keen to please the new teacher and there was bound to be a competitive element to it.
Having run to two walls, the girl collided with another and as a result of the collision, she fell on to her wrist and broke a bone.
The girl claimed compensation from the city council, the local authority responsible for the school.
Legal Outcome
The court determined that it should have been obvious and foreseeable that there were risks, and there was negligence as a result.
This decision (to award damages) should not be taken as a case when anyone who is believed to have an injury following an accident is compensated. The game (the warm-up activity) was hazardous. Some games are physical and will cause injuries, but the activity in this case was a ‘warm-up’, and such an exercise need not be hazardous.
The girl was awarded £4,000.
What can we learn from what happened?
In this case, context was everything. The judge was not saying that whenever someone is hurt playing sport or taking part in activities should receive damages or the organisation responsible should be liable. He was saying that under these circumstances (unfamiliar environment, new teacher who didn’t know the girls, girls who didn’t know each other), a warm-up should not introduce the level of risk that it did.
The judgement above that ‘it should have been obvious and foreseeable that there were risks, and there was negligence as a result’ could be a little misleading. All sports and activities carry risks and accidents are foreseeable – they just need to be managed.
Source of Information
ISRM circular