In May's E-Legal: Advice on mineral rights in "Your place or mine?", procurement advice for academies and public sector bodies plus details of our latest events. 

The Public Equality Duty came into force on 5 April 2011.  It effectively replaced the previous equality duties which related only to disability, race and gender and sought to introduce a wider duty with less of an administrative burden on public bodies.

The Equality Duty is a duty on all public bodies, which includes institutions of further and higher education, requiring them to consider the needs of all individuals in their day-to-day work – in sharing policy, delivering services and in relation to their own employees.

Following the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been tasked with completing a consultation with a view to preparing Codes of Practice to assist institutions and businesses in their aim to be compliant with the Equality Act.  In order to assist Further and Higher Education providers, the Commission is drafting the Code of Practice in Further and Higher Education.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has announced new powers that will allow head teachers to effectively remove an under-performing teacher within a term.  The new measures are considered to be in response to growing criticism of the fact that current procedures have only seen 17 employees struck off in the past decade.

In thie month's employment law e-bulletin, solicitor Hazel Phillips provides an update on holidays and holiday requests, in the light of  the Olympics, the Jubilee holidays and Easter. 

Spring is in the air, the Easter holidays will soon be no more than a fading memory – it’s the perfect time for most people to start planning the next big break but what rights do they have?

In this month's E-Legal: What's happening on World IP Day, Absence webinar now online & EU data proposals. 

In this issue of E-Legal, John Priddle gets whimsical about leap years and quarter days while Aaron Lyons explains the impact of a recent Employment Appeal Tribunal on fixed term workers and redundancy. 

The recent Employment Appeal Tribunal decision in the above case provides clarification on what constitutes “an organised grouping of employees” in relation to a service provision change.

Employment law solicitor Aaron Lyons looks at the impact of a recent Employment Appeal decision on fixed term workers.