Disability Discrimination

If you think your child has been discriminated against because of their epilepsy, you normally need to make the complaint within six months of the discrimination happening. There are some exceptions to this which are described below.
If the complaint is about expulsion from a state-funded school, you should appeal to the Expulsion Appeals Tribunal. This appeal must normally be made within ten days of the dated letter from the school principal telling you of the expulsion. Complaints about expulsion from non-maintained schools should be referred to SENDIST. If the complaint is about an institution of further or higher education, these complaints are dealt with in the county court. You can contact the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland for more information on how to make a complaint about a further or higher education provider.

What to do if you think your child has been discriminated against:

• Talk to the school principal.
  
  Tell them that you feel the school has discriminated against your child. Explain what the school could do to remedy the discrimination, for example including your child in an activity that they have been excluded from. You could describe any reasonable steps the school could take to prevent discrimination from happening again, for example providing training for staff. Bear in mind that these steps must be reasonable: if preventing the discrimination would have been very costly or difficult for the school, it is likely that the school was not breaking the law by discriminating. When you are considering asking the school to make reasonable adjustments, be open minded about possible solutions.
  
  Example: if a child in a wheelchair does not have full access to the curriculum because classrooms for some subjects are upstairs in several different buildings, it would not be “reasonable” to expect the school to install lifts. But moving the teachers and lessons, so that the pupil and their peers can have full access to the curriculum on the ground floor is likely to be reasonable.
  
• If the school does not stop discriminating or does not remedy the situation, ask to use its formal complaints procedure.
  
• Write to the school governors to explain your concerns.
  
• If the school is still discriminating or has not addressed the original problem, you can make a formal claim of discrimination to SENDIST. You can contact the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland to find out whether they feel that you have grounds for a claim. You may also seek conflict resolution at the same time.