A COUNCIL was last night accused of “outrageous” behaviour and having “no shame” after failing to make public an inquiry report into errors which led to a £1.7m payout for a bullied teacher.

Karen Hall received compensation and costs totalling more than £1.5m following a series of scathing employment tribunal and appeal rulings involving her former employer Durham County Council, while the local authority also paid £200,000 in interest accrued on the awards.

Last October the council announced an internal review of Mrs Hall’s case and said failures would be dealt with “effectively and transparently”.

But after a report was produced it was presented to members behind closed doors with the matter made exempt, meaning there could be no attendance from the press and public.

Mrs Hall, from Hamsterley, near Bishop Auckland, a former teacher at West Cornforth Primary School, attended the briefing by the council’s chief internal auditor, but was not allowed to speak and said she had been denied sight of the report.

Durham County Council said the report, from a “thorough and robust” investigation, was considered in private because it contained personal information, but Mrs Hall said the individuals involved had already been named in publicly-available employment tribunal judgements and there had never been any question of anonymity.

Last night County Councillor Alex Watson said: “It is outrageous that the findings were not heard in an open and transparent fashion and put into the public domain.

“I never thought the report would be presented behind closed doors, but it is an attempt to mitigate their handling of an unfair dismissal case, costing in excess of £1.5m.

“This at a time when good people are losing their jobs in the council’s quest for savings, frontline services are being affected, we have centres for people with learning disabilities closing, not to mention the much treasured DLI museum.

“I detected no shame, no remorse in their treatment of Karen Hall, nor over the cost to the taxpayer.

“There was no formal apology, despite her being in attendance.

“She had her career destroyed, suffered years of distress and deserves credit for having the courage of her conviction to take on a monolith of bureaucracy.”

Cllr Watson said the council had been “massively embarrassed” over the saga.

County Councillor John Shuttleworth said: “There should be a full public examination of the facts and let people make their own minds up.”

County Councillor Owen Temple added: “I have real concerns that financial and reputational risks to the council arising from this case and others such as the teaching assistants dispute are not coming into the political arena until it is too late.

“If councillors don’t know what the risks are when they become apparent they cannot protect the public interest.”

Mrs Hall, who has received an apology from the school’s former headteacher Janet Sarsfield, was first awarded £59,321 in December 2008 after a tribunal found she had suffered 18 separate acts of victimisation and lost her job the following August.

The council, along with school governors, “deliberately and flagrantly” ignored tribunal recommendations and covered up serious complaints by Mrs Hall.

It continued to fight aspects of the case and as late as September it was still challenging the calculation of an award which deemed that Mrs Hall had a 100 per cent chance of being a headteacher by the age of 50.

The litigation only ended earlier this year and the saga was summed up by Mr Justice Langstaff, president of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, who called it “astonishing”.

Mrs Hall told The Northern Echo that a summary given to councillors had been factually inaccurate and the inquiry was not independent, as claimed.

She said: “The report should be made public, it is taxpayers’ money spent.

“I cannot see how lessons can be learned when the findings of the tribunal and facts are not accurately presented.”

In a statement the council said Mrs Hall was invited to attend a personal briefing to discuss the outcomes of the review and the “lessons learned” would be presented publicly in an update to the audit committee in September.

The report recommends internal auditors investigate potentially complicated cases and suggests employment tribunal judgements are discussed regularly between human resources, school governor support and legal teams employed by the council.

Collette Longbottom, Durham County Council’s head of legal and democratic services, said: “The report concludes that advice was given, but that the school failed to act on some of that advice while it appealed one of the original recommendations.

“This was a particularly complex case, at a time of significant change for the council around local government re-organisation. Whilst expert advice was taken, the unique set of circumstances involved meant the escalating costs were not envisaged.

“The report lists more than fifteen actions already completed which now result in greater understanding, scrutiny, management and oversight of complex cases such as these.

"The council would intervene if these circumstances presented themselves today.”