Course Catalogue

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This course offers a unique learning experience, developing empathy by journeying through and critically reflecting on a real-life employment tribunal hearing. The course focuses on building understanding of how the employment tribunal operates, why they matter to people, and how workers and employers end up there. Hopefully it will help students to avoid them in their future working lives! The course will support students to build up the knowledge and skills to meaningfully observe and take notes on live hearings, reporting and reflecting on what they see there. This will form the basis of a mini-research project to investigate a theme of interest, developing the implications for policy. The course will offer insights into the professional practice of people management, and hence increase confidence when entering the world of work. Students will also develop their observational, reflection, research, writing and presenting skills.

Seminar rooms will be required from weeks 1-10.

The course involves 7 weekly seminars of 2 hours duration, 1 tribunal visit (3 hours 'field work') and two tutorials provided online while teaching staff support the field work. While 2 weeks will be spent outside of the classroom observing, it is not entirely predictable when the ideal time will be to fall in line with the tribunal's scheduling.

Entry to an Honours programme in Business and Management or a GPA of 12 in the level 2 courses listed below for students taking an Honours programme in another subject:
• MGT2010 Business Decision Analysis
• MGT2011 Fundamentals of Human Resource Management
• MGT2012 Services and Operations Management
•MGT2014 Entrepreneurship

None

The summative assessment requires students to write a mini-research project report, investigating a theme identified through observation of a real-life employment tribunal hearing.

Where, exceptionally, reassessment on Honours courses is required to satisfy professional/accreditation requirements, only the overall course grade achieved at the first attempt will contribute to the Honours classification.

The central aim of this course is to introduce students to the Employment Tribunal System and to enable them to critically reflect upon how it operates, what it is like to navigate, and the merits of various calls for its reform. Experiential learning will be a central element of the course and assessment as students prepare to and ultimately observe a live, real-life employment tribunal hearing. Students will be tasked to research around and write up a mini-research report, based on a theme that emerges from the observation, and through engaging with a broad array of literature and the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders (e.g. government, the human resource profession, trade unions and other civil society organisations). Students will come away from the course with insight into this important area of professional practice, which is one of the most challenging. Hopefully, the experience is not one with which students will have to contend with as either a worker-claimant seeking justice, or as respondent-employer defending against a claim of unfair dismissal or discrimination. Rather, and hopefully, they will be better equipped to avoid the tribunal in future as they practice 'in the shadow of the law' (Mnookin and Kornhauser, 1979), aware of what could happen if a conflict escalates. Close to half of all employers will face an ET claim in any two-year period (SETA, 2020: 8). Therefore, a basic knowledge of employment law and its adjudication is essential to anyone managing, or even working for others, but particularly essential for human resource practitioners, equality, diversity and inclusion specialists and senior managers. Based on socio-legal methods of tribunal observation, the course will help students develop several graduate attributes, most prominently insight into professional practice will develop students as subject specialists, and developing critical thinking by considering multiple perspectives on disputes and dispute resolution nurtures independent and critical thinkers, and ethically and socially aware.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

1. Discuss the basic legal concepts, procedures and overriding objectives that guide the operation and day-to-day running of the employment tribunal system.

2. Assess the causes and consequences of conflict in real-life employment disputes.

3. Relate what is observed in employment tribunal hearings to the extent of obtainment of the tribunal's overriding objectives.

4. Critique the policy and or practices of the employment tribunal system, engaging with relevant debates and evidence. 

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.