U.K. court upholds teacher’s religious rights

Kristie Higgs, a pastoral administrator at Farmor’s School in small-town Fairford, England, lost her job for sharing her concerns about proposed LGBTQ and sex education lessons on social media.

The mother of two said the concerns she shared on her private Facebook page stemmed from her Christian beliefs. “My No. 1 concern has always been the effect that learning about sex and gender in school will have on children at such a young age. I have not discriminated against anyone,” Higgs said in a previous statement.

After six years of litigation, Higgs, 48, received good news on Wednesday when Britain’s Court of Appeal overturned lower court decisions to rule that her firing was “unlawfully discriminatory” and “disproportionate.” Higgs lauded the ruling as a “landmark day for Christian freedoms and free speech” in the United Kingdom.

“[This] judgment is as important for free speech as it is for freedom of religion,” Higgs said outside of the Royal Courts of Justice soon after the court’s decision. “The Court of Appeal has now set a clear standard to protect people like me, and the countless other Christians in this nation, to express their beliefs without fear of losing their jobs.”

Higgs’ case stems from two Facebook posts she published in October 2018 following the government’s proposal to make sex education mandatory for children in primary school. As a Christian, she was troubled by the LGBTQ ideology taught in these lessons.

In her first post, Higgs shared a link to a petition challenging the government’s proposal. She said the material is “brainwashing our children” and could suppress Christian views on marriage and gender. In her second post, she linked to an article about the rise of LGBTQ references in children’s books in American schools. “This is happening in our primary schools now,” she wrote in the caption.

Her posts referenced her concerns about her son’s Church of England primary school, not the secondary school where she worked. An anonymous person reported Higgs’ posts to her workplace, contending they were “homophobic and prejudiced to the LGBT community.” A week later, the head teacher at Farmor’s School suspended Higgs and told her she would be investigated for gross misconduct.

School administrators held a disciplinary hearing for Higgs days before Christmas, where they questioned her for six hours and compared her posts to “pro-Nazi” views. When she tried to explain that her views stemmed from her faith, administrators reportedly told her to “keep your religion out of it,” according to Christian Concern, the umbrella organization over Christian Legal Center, which represented Higgs.

In 2019, the school fired Higgs, claiming that her posts could “be perceived as discrimination” and damage the school’s reputation. A year later, an employment tribunal upheld her dismissal and said that Higgs’ argument that the school discriminated against her on religious grounds was invalid.

Then in 2023, Higgs received a partial win from the Employment Appeal Tribunal when it overturned the lower tribunal’s ruling, finding it had not adequately considered her freedom of belief and expression. The case made its way to the Court of Appeal and, on Wednesday, Higgs finally received a full win in a precedent-setting judgment.

In a 57-page ruling, the judges confirmed that the 2010 Equality Act protects the expression of Christian beliefs online. They said the burden is on employers to prove that a dismissal like hers is objectively justified.

Farmor’s School had argued that Higgs’ dismissal stemmed from the language she used in the posts, not her beliefs. The judges rejected this argument, saying the “dismissal was unquestionably a disproportionate response,” and, “even if the language of the re-posts passes the threshold of objectionability, it is not grossly offensive.”

They argued that there was no evidence Higgs’ posts harmed the school, as she posted them on her “personal Facebook account, in her maiden name, and with no reference to the school.”

The Court of Appeal’s ruling establishes a “huge” legal precedent that any dismissal for an expression or manifestation of Christian faith is illegal, said Roger Kiska, a consultant solicitor for Christian Legal Center.

After this ruling, if people share religious views on social media or in a public setting, they have a “much-heightened threshold before they can get disciplined for those views,” he said.

While the Equality Act upheld Higgs’ free speech rights, this ruling is a “big deal” for the U.K. because it doesn’t have the First Amendment like the United States, Kiska noted. “Speech isn’t nearly as protected. But this is certainly the right step in that direction,” he said, adding that Higgs can now head back to the employment tribunal to see what damages she will be awarded.

In recent years, teachers like Higgs have lost their cases in U.K. courts. Joshua Sutcliffe, a former math teacher, was dismissed from two schools in 2017 and 2019, first for refusing to call students by pronouns inconsistent with their sex and then for critiquing Islam on his personal YouTube page. The Teaching Regulation Agency indefinitely banned Sutcliffe from the teaching profession in 2023, finding him guilty of unprofessional conduct.

Higgs’ ruling is a “big signal to the world that maybe free speech is back in the U.K.,” Kiska said. “At least, the judges are taking it more seriously.”