Every day when you drop your child off at school or nursery you are essentially putting their health and welfare in the hands of the teachers and other employees. However, accidents do sometimes happen and your child could sustain an injury through absolutely no fault of their own. Therefore it is important to understand the process for making a personal injury claim for an accident at school.
Accidents at school don’t cover the usual fall in the playground playing football that causes a child to have at worse a grazed knee. The sorts of accidents that you could claim for are those that could have been avoided but occurred due to the negligence of someone else. Such accidents include slipping on a wet floor that wasn’t properly signalled or burning a hand on a Bunsen burner because the proper equipment and/or direction were not provided.
What to do if your child has an accident at school
Although for the most part children go to school every day and come home without any issues, accidents at school are more common than you would think. Every year solicitors handle claims for a child who sustained an injury whilst at school due to the negligence of someone else.
There are countless different injuries that can occur in schools when you consider the amount of potential hazards around schools. Featured below are just a few of the types of accidents at school that have led to a successful injury claim in the past:
- Slipping on a wet floor
- Burning a hand in cooking class because the correct equipment wasn’t provided
- Being injured by faulty equipment in the Technology department
These are just some of the common accidents that occur but there are a wide array of incidents that can lead to an accident at school claim. In essence, if your child has an accident at school due to the negligence of someone else, they could be able to make a personal injury claim.
Making a claim for an accident at school
You have three years in which to make an injury claim once the accident occurred or 3 years from when the injuries are made apparent. Furthermore, if your child is under the age of 18, you can make the claim on their behalf and any compensation awarded will be kept in escrow until they reach adulthood.
In order to make a claim, you need to be able to prove that someone else is at fault for the injuries sustained by your child. Therefore, it is essential that you gather as much evidence as possible to strengthen your claim and highlight the fault of the other party. A great way of doing this is by obtaining statements from anyone who witnessed the event as they will be able to confirm your version of events.
Once you feel that you are in a position to make a claim, you need to hire a personal injury solicitor to manage the case. They will then be able to initiate the claims process and put you on the road to receiving the compensation your child deserves.
Injury Claim Specialists is one of the UK’s leading personal injury advice websites. We pride ourselves on offering easy to understand, plain English injury claims advice on a wide range of different injury related topics. There are also a number of extremely useful tools such as the Compensation Calculator, which can give you a compensation estimate in less than a second, and the Injury Claims Guide is at hand to answer all of your personal injury related questions.