The Claimant worked for the Respondent in secondary education, but his registration was for further education. When this discrepancy was investigated, the Respondent terminated the Claimant's employment on the basis that he did not have the necessary registration under regulation 4 of the Requirements for Teachers (Scotland) Regulations 2005 ("the 2005 Regulations"). The Claimant brought proceedings for unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal, and the ET upheld his claims and awarded compensation, concluding that it was for the local authority to determine whether a teacher must be registered; accordingly, the Respondent had not made out that the reason for dismissal was the potentially fair reason of a statutory bar. The Respondent appealed on the grounds that the ET erred in law (1) by misinterpreting regulation 4 of the 2005 Regulations by considering that a registered teacher was merely one whose particulars are recorded in the Register and without taking into account the subdivision of the Register into parts dealing with primary, secondary and further education, (2) by failing to address its submission that compensation should be assessed on the basis of contractual sick pay and not full pay, and (3) in its calculation of pension loss.

The EAT held that the appropriate construction of regulation 4 of the 2005 Regulations was that only teachers who are unregistered (that is, those whose particulars are not recorded in the Register) were precluded from being employed by education authorities, so the ET did not err in law in concluding that there was no statutory bar to the Claimant's continued employment. Further, the ET was entitled to assess loss on the basis of full pay, given its findings as to causation, and it had been open to the ET to assess pension loss in the way that it did.