They have laboured for years as the poor relations in the education workforce, rightly treasured by teachers and headteachers as a vital element in school life but not given the pay and status they deserve. But now - after years of waiting and months of painstaking negotiations - more than 300,000 school support staff have their own pay negotiating body to ensure 'the specific role they play is recognised and reflected fairly and openly across all schools'.
The School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSNB) was officially launched by the Department of Children, Schools and Families Secretary of State Ed Balls at the Labour party conference in September, where he said of support staff, 'I want them to make the maximum contribution in the classroom and behind the scenes - and their pay and conditions must reflect their contribution.'
A Government statement put a little more flesh on the bones of the proposal by declaring, 'The national framework will facilitate a much greater degree of clarity and consistency in the terms and conditions of support staff nationwide than is possible under the current arrangements, while still allowing employers sufficient flexibility to meet their local needs.'
Consistency and clarity have certainly been lacking in the determination of support staff pay, including the legions of teaching assistants who provide sterling backing for teachers. Significantly, the Government announced the new body while at the same time recognising that teachers have been forced to cover for absent colleagues and have not had their full planning, preparation and assessment time. It plans to legislate to ensure the workforce agreement introduced in 2005 is enforced.
The Government has appointed Philip Ashmore as the SSNB's first chair on a three-year contract, and he has first-hand experience of dealing with national pay issues. He has sat on the NHS pay review body which is responsible for making pay recommendations for 1.2 million health staff.
Previously he was responsible for planning and running the public transport and Metro services in Tyne and Wear, and spent 11 years as HR director at Nissan Motor Manufacturing.
While there has been a sigh of relief at the creation of the SSNB from staff and their unions, it has been a long 12 months of hard negotiation on the Support Staff Working Group since plans to introduce the new pay body were announced. There is clearly a lot of hard bargaining ahead to ensure that it has firm foundations.
The GMB union's national secretary Brian Strutton, who will be a member of the SSNB, said, 'The first thing we must do is establish a common set of terms and conditions for support staff, because we cannot do anything else until that is done. At the moment, support staff contracts, the way they are paid and the conditions they are entitled to are all over the place and almost incomprehensible in their complexity.'
EQUAL PAY
Many support staff, including classroom assistants, have fallen foul of the equal pay process taking place in local government under the single status agreement. Long-serving teaching assistant Gina Smith, for example, found that following the single-status process, her pay was slashed by £240 a month.
She is now classed as a part-time worker, even though she works longer hours and takes on more responsibility to make up for the loss of pay. She welcomes the new pay body but insists that the only way she and many of her colleagues can be compensated for being losers under single status is to be given a pay rise.
Mr Strutton says that if the new body is 'set up and running properly', school support staff will come out of the local government negotiating machinery and so will 'no longer be part of single status'.
Mr Strutton wants the new body to establish a 'standard contract of employment, with standard terms and conditions and standard rates of pay'. He points to the wide discrepancy in pay, 'not just between local authorities but between schools in authorities'.
He adds, 'It's hard to see how this can be taken forward unless we establish what those jobs are, what they are worth and how much money should be attached to them.'
He says that while considerable progress has been made in designing the contract of employment, work on jobs and pay has barely started. He is realistic about the need for flexibility.
'It is not going to be possible to design a single standard job for a caretaker and a teaching assistant. To expect 23,000 schools to comply and change what they do is not going to happen, we need a framework that is sufficiently flexible to cope with most of the variation out there,' he said.
The deadline of having all this in place by next April is unlikely to be met - a more realistic target would seem to be September 2009. Mr Strutton says that once the essential building blocks are in place, the SSNB can then start building on to that personal and career development, competency-based progression and 'rewards for staff for what they actually do, which the current system was just too inflexible to cope with'.
He cites the example of the 13,000 higher level teaching assistants (HLTA) who have been trained, but only half of whom are doing HLTA work and being recognised and paid for it. He says, 'The other half are no doubt using the skills they have acquired but not in a recognised capacity. That's the type of thing for support staff that smacks of abuse and not being treated fairly.'
INDEPENDENT STATUS
Unison, which represents the bulk of school support staff, signalled at a seminar last summer attended by Schools Minister Jim Knight that it would be developing training specifically for school staff representatives on any new agreement to ensure they knew what it meant and could make sure schools implemented it.
Unison official Bruni de la Motte says the statutory backing for the new body was important, 'as it would ensure that it had teeth'. She adds that the independent status of academies means they are not part of these arrangements, but the unions would continue to press for their inclusion.
Philip Parkin, general secretary of the teaching union Voice, which represents support staff, said he hoped the new body would achieve better pay and conditions. But he added that he would have preferred it to have been a pay review body.
After Ed Balls' announcement, Mr Parkin said, 'It is vital that the new committee is truly independent and representative of all support staff in schools.'
But Dean Shoesmith, a leading figure in the human resources departments of both Merton and Sutton councils and vice-president of the Public Sector People Managers' Association, said there was concern among local authorities about the planned new body. He said it would have made more sense to include support staff pay in arrangements covering all staff employed in children's services.
While the unions have fought hard to secure the SSNB, Brian Strutton says it is 'not a no-brainer' that support staff, who have had to endure so much uncertainty for so many years, will automatically want to embrace the new arrangements when they are balloted on them.
He insists that headteachers and governors will have to implement the new arrangements and that support staff should be proactive in ensuring that takes place. He concludes, 'A huge communications exercise needs to take place. They are traditionally a difficult population to communicate with directly. I hope we get it right. If we don't, then support staff will continue to languish as the poor partners, whereas we want them to be properly paid and properly recognised as the true professionals they are.'
