The Grahamstown high court has ruled that elite private school Kingswood College was not negligent when a fight between two teenage pupils in an unsupervised classroom resulted in a serious eye injury for one of them.
Former Kingswood pupil Lusakhanya Gora, now 20, sued the Makhanda school for R3.1m after a brief punch up with another pupil in 2014 left him with limited vision in one eye.
Due to some miscommunication, a substitute teacher was not placed in the classroom to replace a teacher who had been absent.
Some persistent teasing by Gora of a new pupil, Daniel Moore, had resulted in Moore throwing a punch which broke Gora’s glasses. This had caused serious injury to his one eye.
Gora’s vision is now limited in the one eye due to corneal scarring.
Gora claimed the school had been negligent in leaving a classroom of 15-year-old girls and boys unsupervised.
But judge Jeremy Pickering disagreed.
He said to find the school negligent, it would have to be established that the school should reasonably have foreseen that its conduct could result in harm.
There was nothing in the classroom environment that would pose an inherent risk to any of the pupils.
He said the school had a strict code of conduct which pupils were expected to adhere to, including conducting themselves in a mature and responsible manner.
He said Gora and Moore were 15-year-old pupils who could be expected to act maturely and responsibly in the safe environs of the classroom.
“In my view therefore it was not reasonably foreseeable that an incident such as the present would occur and the conduct of the school employees in leaving the class unattended did not amount to negligence.”
Even if he was wrong about this, the parents had signed an indemnity that effectively indemnified the school against all claims, even those arising from negligence. This did not include gross negligence.
He said there could be no question of the school or the staff being grossly negligent. He dismissed the application...