Who should pay for additional educational needs, asks Andrew Ritchie QC
Children and adolescents who have suffered brain injury as a result of a tort will have additional needs for educational assistance. The state provides schools and (questionably) adequate education for the general population. It also provides additional help for those with special needs, but often does not cater adequately for them. So can the claimant recover damages for his additional educational needs?
The main principle
Damages are recoverable in full for the additional cost and expense involved in providing for an injured child’s special needs where those needs were caused by the defendant’s tort. Other examples of heads of loss where the defendant is required to fund the costs of the injured child’s special needs include: speech therapy; occupational therapy; physiotherapy; specially adapted household aids and equipment; adapted IT aids and equipment; specially adapted transport; nursing care; and housing.
This statement of the full compensation principle springs from a long established tort rule summarised 129 years ago by Lord Blackburn in Livingstone v Rawyards Coal (1880) 5 App Cas 25: “I do not
