Academy trust chief executives will not be defined as school support staff under plans to re-establish a national pay negotiating body proposed by government.
The Department for Education has today launched a consultation on the school support staff negotiating body (SSSNB), which is due to be reinstated under ministers’ flagship employment rights bill.
The SSSNB will provide a dedicated forum for negotiating pay, terms, and conditions for school support staff, ministers have said.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said: “We are consulting on a number of areas to ensure that the body is set up to reflect the context in schools today.
“That understanding is essential to ensure that the transition to the SSSNB does not disadvantage school support staff or move them onto less favourable terms because of new agreements.”
Trust execs removed
Schools Week revealed last year how chief executives and central team staff fell within the definition of support staff under the terms of the legislation.
Consultation documents acknowledged this “broad definition”, and government is now seeking to remove those roles.
This includes CEOs, COOs and CFOs, all of whose “roles have distinct characteristics and needs that differ from those of support staff”.
Last year, Jean Boyle, head of education at Stone King, said the drafting of the legislation was “really confusing”.
The papers show that the current definition “only includes academy staff working wholly at one or more academies”. It also does not cover those working in both maintained and academy settings.
What about agency workers?
Under the plans, DfE will include trust staff “who work from locations other than academies” but whose work “would otherwise be in scope” in the definition.
The changes mean “HR officers or administrative staff working from a head office” would be brought into scope, along with those “carrying out work in other locations such as maintained schools”.
Officials are also consulting to understand “potential scale of change” bringing agency workers into the SSSNB would have.
They believe that doing so would mean agency worker contracts would have to change, entitling them to “at least the minimum pay and the core conditions agreed for support staff”.
They would also need to be represented on the body itself.
Pay ‘call for evidence’
“We think it may only be realistic to include agency workers who have a contract with an agency and work only in school settings – like directly employed school support staff – in the SSSNB in future. We want to test this idea,” the documents said.
Through the consultation, government has also launched a support staff pay and conditions “call for evidence”. This will support DfE’s “understanding of current arrangements and inform the transition to the new system”.
But the papers noted that the “precise way” the body will operate – including how it sets pay and the “content of any core terms and conditions” – will be determined by the SSSNB once it’s launched.
Phillipson stressed: “The SSSNB will provide a dedicated forum for negotiating pay, terms, and conditions for school support staff.
“All support staff in state-funded schools in England will benefit from this core offer, while allowing schools the flexibility to respond to local circumstances above the minimum agreements reached.”
Well, most MAT CEOs and Exec Heads can’t be called support staff as they don’t actually support the teachers in any conceivable way – on the ground, in the classroom, on corridors or in settings that might make a difference. They are simply expensive pastoral workers/lunchtime supervisors. Solve the retention and recruitment crisis by demanding they return to the classroom on a full timetable or forfeit 50% of their pension to the school/local authority education budget.
One thing is certain, CEOs and central MAT management staff are not paid at the same low rates as our incredible school support staff.
I have just completed a piece of research on CEO pay across the 31 MATs that operate across North Yorkshire across North Yorkshire, where I am NEU Branch Secretary.
Many CEOs had between £10,000 and £20,000 pay increases between the last 2 sets of accounts published by Companies House.
CEOs are taking above inflation pay increases whilst our support staff members are facing wage cuts, moving from whole year contracts to term time only.