How Much Compensation Can I Claim For A Nursery Accident?

By Cat Way. Last Updated 24th May 2023. Nobody wants to think about their child being injured at nursery.

We send our offspring to nursery to be taken care of, and if the child had an accident at nursery, then it is not fulfilling its vital function of keeping the child safe. If your child is injured, then you may be able to start a school/nursery accident claim if negligence by such a party is what led your child to suffer harm.

Nursery And School Accidents

In this guide, we are going to take a detailed look at what to do if your child has suffered an accident and injury whilst at nursery. We will explain what should be done following accidents in a childcare setting and before any compensation claim is started.

We will also walk you through the process of starting a claim. We will also present some typical amounts that have historically been paid to parents as damages for an accident that their child suffered at nursery.

Select a Section:

• What Can I Claim If There Has Been An Accident At My Child’s Nursery Or School?
• Who Is Responsible For Accidents At A Nursery Or School?
• For What Reason Can I Claim Compensation Against A Nursery Or School?
• What Is The Time Limit For Nursery Accident Claims?
• How To Make A School Or Nursery Compensation Claims
• Compensation Claim Amounts for Nursery and School Incidents
• No Win No Fee School And Nursery Compensation Claims

What Can I Claim If There Has Been an Accident at My Child’s Nursery or School?

This is a very tough question to answer. The reason for this is that firstly you may be claiming for the child, and secondly, as the parent, you also may have a valid reason to claim compensation for yourself. Below is an explanation of some of the forms of compensation and damages that may be paid following a nursery accident.

• General damages to the child – in this case, we are talking about the physical injury itself. The pain and suffering caused by the injury. And in severe cases, where the child has long-term psychological trauma as a result of the accident, this will be covered in general damages as well.
• Special damages to the child – this is a less common form of compensation paid to a child as a result of an accident in a nursery. It covers any financial hardship suffered by the child, which is obviously not common. However, in some cases, it is a valid reason to claim compensation. For example, if the child is a young actor and is forced to miss an acting job due to the accident resulting in financial loss.
• Special damages to the guardian – this is a much more common type of special damages in a nursery accident case. It covers financial hardship suffered by the parent or guardian. For example, if they have lost earning due to having to take time away from work to take care of the child following the accident. And in the case of a serious accident meaning the guardian must give up; work to care for the child long-term, the loss of future earnings would also fit into this category of damages.
• Travel expenses – this relates directly to any travel expenses that occurred as a result of the accident. This could be immediate expenses such as having to take a taxi to the hospital to be with the child as quickly as possible after an accident. It can also cover ongoing travel expenses, such as having to visit a hospital regularly for outpatient treatment.
• Medical expenses – any costs that were accrued due to having to have the injury treated, and also the long-term treatment of injury related issues. We can also include psychiatric care and trauma counselling in this category if they are being paid for privately.
• Psychological trauma – this is a pretty broad category. Generally speaking, psychological trauma will be covered in general damages. However, in some cases where a child is expected to face long-term life-changing psychological problems as a result of the accident, the law has made special provision for taking this into consideration when calculating any compensation that is to be awarded.

These are the most common types of damages that are sought by a parent or guardian following a nursery accident. There are others, and you will need the advice of a qualified legal expert to discover if any more types of damages can be claimed in your particular nursery accident case.

Who is Responsible for Accidents at a Nursery or School?

If your child is injured at school or whilst they are attending nursery, it is likely somebody is responsible, and where there is responsibility there is also a liability, meaning they may be liable to pay damages and compensation for the accident. Even if the accident was clearly the child’s fault, then somebody should have been ensuring the child could not get into the kind of trouble that caused the accident in the first place. Schools and nurseries have a duty keeping children safe in education and to prevent accidents.

So we are almost always talking negligence of some kind in a nursery accident compensation claim. Either negligence by the management of the nursery for failing to provide adequate safety for the child. Or negligence on the part of the nursery staff, for not undertaking their duties correctly.

The issue gets a little grey of your child injured at school by another child. UK protects minors from legal action. However, once again, there is a likelihood that the nursery itself was to blame in some way.

For What Reason Can I Claim Compensation Against a Nursery or School?

There are a whole range of reasons why a parent or guardian may claim compensation following a nursery accident, either on behalf of the child or on behalf of the child. Some of the most common reasons are:

• Inadequate environmental safety provisioning – here we are talking about nursery accidents that were clearly caused by an unsafe nursery environment. Examples of this would include; old, damaged and unsafe play equipment. Sharp and dangerous edges left exposed on equipment. And also, general safety concerns such as access to the street and road being available to unsupervised children.
• Inadequate staffing or under trained care staff – every nursery is regulated legally to provide a minimum number of staff for the number of children in attendance. Furthermore, the nursery is also regulated to ensure that properly trained senior staff are always on site at all times to support junior employees. If inadequate staffing levels led to the accident, this is a valid reason to claim.
• Negligence on the part of the staff – if employees failed to carry out their duties to an adequate level of competence, thus exposing the child to the risk of an accident, then this is also a reason to claim damages.

Almost every claim for compensation following a nursery accident will be fundamentally driven by one of these three core areas of responsibility. Almost every accident that occurs at a nursery, will have been caused by one or more of these reasons.

What Is The Time Limit For Nursery Accident Claims?

All nursery accident claims must be started within the relevant time limit. As set out in the Limitation Act 1980, the usual time limit for starting a personal injury claim for adults is three years, starting from the date of the incident that injured them.

However, if the injured party is a child, then the time limit works differently. Instead, the three-year time limit will be paused until the day of their 18th birthday. Before this date, a court-appointed litigation friend could make a nursery accident claim on their behalf. For example, this could be a parent or solicitor. If a claim has not been made by their 18th birthday, they will have three years to start one.

To learn more about the time limit for claiming nursery accident compensation, you can contact our advisors. They could also inform you of the additional exceptions to this three-year time limit.

How to Make a Nursery or School Compensation Claim

You may be asking what to do if a child has an accident at a nursery and you wish to claim on their behalf due to negligence. The first legal step you should take is to collect evidence which establishes how your child became injured and how negligence from another party led to this. Evidence you may be able to gather could potentially include witness accounts and medical reports. You could then consider contacting a qualified solicitor or law firm to represent you and support your case.

Without expert legal advice and guidance, it may be challenging for you to press forward with a damages claim effectively. We recommend you hire a school negligence lawyer who has previous experience in handling these types of cases. Such a lawyer can set you on the right track by offering guidance through each step of the claiming process. If you have strong grounds to make a claim on your child’s behalf then Legal Expert may be able to provide a No Win No Fee solicitor who can support you and utilise their experience in nursery accident claims.

If you choose us, we will always start every compensation claim case with a completely free of charge consultancy session. We use this session to get to the bottom of events leading up to the accident, and how it occurred. We then use the facts we have learned to offer you advice on what to do next. In almost every case, this means we will represent you under a conditional fee agreement. If we don’t win compensation for you, then you don’t pay a thing. If we do win, we take our fee from the damages you are awarded. We will only ever take as much as 25% of all money awarded to you as our fee, meaning you get to keep the remaining 75% and you have not had to pay any money up front.

Compensation Claim Amounts for Nursery and School Incidents

You might have used our compensation calculator to estimate how much compensation your child could be eligible for. However, a calculator may not be able to include every aspect of a claim. For example, if your son was injured, special damages, such as physical therapy costs, might also be recovered. We looked at special damages earlier in this guide.

General Damages

If the claim is successful, general damages will compensate for your child’s physical pain and mental suffering caused by their injuries. To help assign value to pain and suffering, legal professionals may use the Judicial College Guidelines (JCG). This is a document used in personal injury claims in England and Wales. It lists injuries with severities next to compensation brackets.

If you would like help with how to sue a school for negligence in the UK, call our advisors. In addition to going through the accidents at school procedures, they can provide a more accurate claim valuation.

No Win No Fee Nursery and School Compensation Claims

If your child was injured in a school or nursery because of a breach of duty and you’d like to make a claim on their behalf, one of our solicitors may be able to help. If you have a valid claim, they may offer you a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA), which is a type of No Win No Fee arrangement.

When making a claim with a solicitor under this type of arrangement, you can access their services without paying any upfront or ongoing fees. Additionally, if your claim does not succeed, you will not need to pay them for their services.

If your nursery accident claim succeeds, then your solicitor will take a success fee from your award. This fee is a small percentage with a legal cap, which means you keep the majority amount of what you receive.

Our team of advisors are on hand to help if you’d like to learn more about how to sue a nursery in the UK. They can offer a free evaluation of your claim, and if they find that you could be entitled to personal injury compensation, they may connect you with one of our solicitors. Get in touch today to learn more.

Call for Free Advice and to Start a Claim

Has your child recently been involved in an accident whilst at nursery or at school? Regardless of whether the child believes it was their fault or not, somebody was responsible for ensuring they were kept safe at all times.

This means that somebody was to blame for the accident happening, even if it was your child that caused it, as they should have been supervised more closely.

Therefore, you have a very valid reason to make a compensation claim against the nursery or school. So you really must contact us right now. We will arrange an initial free session where we will gather the facts of the accident, and then we will offer you our best advice on how to press the matter. In almost every case this means us representing you under a No Win No Fee type of arrangement. Nothing to pay now, and you only pay our fees if we win damages on your behalf. So what have you got to lose? Contact us today to discover whether we can help you claim compensation for an accident that your child suffered whilst attending school or being looked after at a nursery.

Related Links

In this final section of our guide covering nursery accident claims, we’ve included some links to relevant pages and to other personal injury claim guides on our website:

• Tell Ofsted about a serious childcare incident: online form for local authorities
• Ofsted Notification of serious childcare incident

Other Personal Injury Claim Guides

• Read our Accident At Work Claims Guide to learn more about personal injury compensation and injuries in the workplace.
• Our Head Injury Claims Guide offers more information on claiming compensation for a head injury.
• If you’ve injured your arm, our Arm Injury Claims Guide can offer more guidance on the claims process and how compensation is calculated.
• Supermarket Accident Claims Guide
• Work Illness Claims Guide
• Child Personal Injury Claims – if your child has suffered an injury in an accident, here’s a guide explaining how to make a claim