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.
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
- 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?
Compensation in successful nursery accident claims can be awarded to both the parent/legal guardian or the child themselves, depending on the circumstances of the claim. We set out the possible ways compensation could be awarded here:
- General damages to the child – compensation for the physical and psychological harm caused to the child as a result of the breach of duty.
- Special damages to the child – this is much less common owing to the fact special damages awards for monetary losses and young children in the vast majority of cases, do not undertake paid work. However, a possible case would be if the child was a young actor and they have to leave their role as a result of the harm caused.
General damages can be calculated using relevant medical evidence alongside the Judicial College Guidelines (JCG). This publication contains the guideline compensation brackets for various injuries. We have used some relevant JCG figures here.
Potential Compensation Values
Please be advised that the first value was not taken from the JCG and that this information has been provided for guidance purposes only.
- Multiple very serious injuries with additional special damages including lost income, medical expenses, and home modifications. – Up to £500,000 plus.
- Moderate (c)(ii) brain damage – moderate to modest deficit in intellect and greatly reduced ability to work – £110,720 to £183,190.
- Less severe (d) brain damage – a good recovery from memory and concentration issues and ability to return to daily activities – £18,700 to £52,550.
- Chest Injuries – Traumatic injury (b) – permanent damage, functional impairment and reduction in life expectancy. – £80,240 to £122,850.
- Back Injuries – Severe (a)(iii) – cases involving disc lesions, fractures or soft tissue damage resulting in chronic conditions. – £47,320 to £85,100.
- Back Injuries – Moderate (b)(ii) – Disturbance of ligaments and muscles, exacerbation of existing conditions, prolapsed discs – £15,260 to £33,880.
- Other Arm Injuries – Substantial and Permanent Disablement (b)(ii) – such as forearm fractures where there is significant residual disability. – £47,810 to £73,050.
- Other Arm Injuries – Less Sever Injury (b)(iii) – Injuries where a substantial recovery has occurred. – £23,430 to £47,810
- Digestive System – Non-traumatic Injury (i) – severe toxicosis causing vomiting, diarrhoea and acute pain necessitating hospitalisation. – £46,900 to £64,070.
- Digestive System – Non-traumatic Injury (ii) – Serious but short lived food poisoning causing vomiting over two to four weeks – £11,640 to £23,430.
Special Damages
A much more common head of claim that compensation could be awarded under is special damages to the parent or guardian, such as:
- Loss of earnings due to being absent from work to care for the child.
- Medical expenses such as prescriptions or therapy for psychological distress.
- Travel costs due to repeat hospital visits.
- Accessibility modifications to the home.
To get a more personalised idea of what nursery accident compensation you could receive in your particular circumstances, contact our advisors today using the details provided below.
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.
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
