A Buckinghamshire grammar-school computing teacher’s discrimination complaint was dismissed by an employment tribunal. The tribunal ruled that the misspelling of surname was just a typographical error, and had nothing to do with her race.
Chandrika, an Indo-Canadian woman, filed a complaint with the Royal Latin School in September 2022 after receiving a username that contained a wrong version of her last name.
It was an error made when setting up her school’s exam system that her name was recorded as “cpunshan”.
‘Not a deliberate act’
Mary Biltcliffe apologised for the error and said that she was “busy” at the time. The panel agreed that the mistake was typographical and not deliberate. Biltcliffe, the school’s exams manager, apologized and explained that she had been “busy” at the time.
Mrs Punshon claimed that adding the letter “a”, to Hindi words like Himalayas, was “overgeneralisation”. During the hearing, it was established that “Punshon”, her married name, is of English descent.
The tribunal wrote in its written judgement that Mrs Punshon “appears to have accepted in her closing arguments that this was merely a typo error”. It went on to state that the complaint is based on erroneous assumptions and that there “were no persistent mistakes made in spelling her last name”.
No evidence of racism
The tribunal also found that Mrs Punshon had misspelled her own surname, Jason Skyrme despite knowing him and having met him. This undermined Punshon’s argument that her mistake in spelling her name was racially charged.
The tribunal rejected the claim and stated that “Mrs Punshon’s surname was in any case an English name, not Indo-Canadian. Therefore, the misspelling had nothing to do with the race of the woman.”
The tribunal dismissed all of Mrs Punshon’s other claims. This included a claim for direct racial discrimination, direct sex-based discrimination, and harassment relating to race or sex. The panel found that her allegations were not backed up by any evidence.
