A former staff member at a nursery shut down by the United Synagogue has lost a claim of unfair dismissal.

Miss K Watson argued she had lost her job at Little Goldies in Golders Green after blowing the whistle on concerns she had about what was going on there.

But an employment tribunal, in a decision published earlier this month, found that she had resigned rather than being dismissed from her role as a nursery practitioner.

The US closed the nursery at the end of January 2022 after an inspection by Ofsted and its own investigation. Ofsted said that failings in hygiene and safeguarding practice had put children “at risk of harm”.

The Metropolitan Police also launched an investigation into a number of allegations but closed it without taking further action.

Watson was employed at the nursery, which was based at Golders Green Synagogue, from September 2020 after a brief spell there as an agency worker before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.

More than once during the course of 2021, she had talked of resigning, according to the tribunal findings.

But after an incident on December 13 2021, she emailed the nursery manager Alison Mazin to complain of a “toxic work culture”, saying “I will finish this week, and then it will be my last”.

She said she had been “stressed at work for a while” and also referred to concerns she had about hygiene at the nursery.

The following day she turned up for work and stayed until her lunch break, when she saw an email from Mazin acknowledging that “you are leaving Little Goldies:”

Later that day Watson contacted the local council, Barnet, and Ofsted, to report concerns she had about the nursery.

But two days later, she told a US HR representative, “Just to reiterate I have not resigned, I have been signed off by my doctor for work related stress.”

The previous week Watson had called the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children anonymously to disclose information about the nursery.

The tribunal found that her conduct in making serious allegations to Barnet and Ofsted so soon after her email of December 13 was “unlikely to be the actions of someone who believed that the employment relationship was ongoing”.

It also noted that a second whistleblower who had worked at Little Goldies, Sharon Hart, was re-engaged by the United Synagogue after its closure at a different nursery.

The United Synagogue’s HR director Victoria Wiltshire had reassured Hart, the tribunal said, “telling her she had done the right thing and reiterating that the children always came first”.