The members of the Institute are lay religious. The Institute provided the teachers for St William's School, Market Weighton, which closed in 1994. The school had been managed by the Middlesbrough Diocesan Rescue Society until 1982 and thereafter by the Catholic Child Welfare Society (Diocese of Middlesbrough). The previous headmaster, Brother James, had been convicted of a series of sexual offences against boys; and 170 former pupils brought claims against both the managers of the school from 1973 (the Middlesbrough Defendants) and the Institute itself, arguing vicarious liability for alleged acts of sexual and physical abuse committed between 1952 and 1992. The brothers who taught at the school were not contracted to the Institute but to the Middlesbrough Defendants, under secular contracts of employment. On a preliminary issue the High Court held – and the Court of Appeal confirmed – that the Institute was not vicariously liable for any abuse. The Middlesbrough Defendants appealed, arguing that the Institute should share vicarious liability.
The Supreme Court allowed the appeal. Delivering the judgment of the Court, Lord Phillips concluded that the necessary relationship between the brothers and the Institute and the close connection between that relationship and the abuse committed at the school had been made out; that the business and mission of the Institute to give a Christian education to boys was the common business and mission of every brother who was a member of it; and that there was a very close connection between the relationship of the brothers with the Institute and the employment of the brothers as teachers in the school. In short, the brother-teachers’ employment at the school was sufficiently closely connected with the sexual abuse that they must be assumed to have committed and it was therefore fair, just and reasonable, by reason of the satisfaction of the relevant criteria, that the Institute should share vicarious liability with the Middlesbrough Defendants. [Frank Cranmer]
