Published on 12, July, 2020
I just wanted to provide some follow up to the Q&A I posted. The suggestion that reasonable adjustments should have been made is correct under present legislation. But its the exam board that needed to make those adjustments. It was the exam board that insisted on real world users. In fact the collage had marked me as generously as they thought they could under the marking scheme and the exam board objected and revised the mark down by 30 points. Prior to the 2005 amendment to the disability discrimination act you couldn't sue an exam board for disability discrimination.
We should be grateful that since then the equality act (2010) has come along and is a lot more comprehensive. Yet enforcing your rights is still hard. I suggest we make this thread about ways the 2010 act could be further improved.
For example the 2010 act still has an excuse built in for exam boards of maintaining academic standards. I'd still have had to argue that gauging my people skills through having me interact with a real person had nothing to do with standards in computing. I'd also have to worry about paying legal fees that could get very large. I have sued someone under the equality act and one of the things you worry about is will you get put on the small claims track. On the small claims track each side pasys their own legal costs and you don't have to use a lawyer. Cases generally get sent to another track if they involve more than 10000£ or if they are too complicated ... and autism can be very complicated. Something that's been done for personal injury claims is qualified one way cost shifting. Basically the accuser pays no legal costs to the defendant if they loose. Parliament has looked at expanding this to discrimination cases but the governments not keen.
Basically all those no win no fee lawyers exist because of qualified one way cost shifting and expanding the scheme would mean we have them for discrimination cases too. It's successfully put the fear of the courts into businesses when it comes to wet floors and cracked pavements. No doubt it would do the same for discrimination.
On the topic is expanding qualified one way cost shifting (QOCS) to discrimination the government was actually sued for not doing this. Judicial review is a process where you can challenge governments decisions on the ground that they are irrational.
at the time the courts position was that there might be a case to answer under the public sector equality duty but that the government hadn’t finished deciding whether or not to extend QOCS to discrimination yet so its non decision couldn’t be called irrational … YET.
the court was clear that if the government just kept doing nothing and claiming it was still making its mind up then eventually a second case could be heard.
so you know if anyone fancies suing the government that’s something to keep in mind.