Nursery World - Pay will rise for assistants (1)

Many classroom assistants in England should be seeing annual salaries of 20,000 by this time next year, following discussions between local authorities and unions about a new national framework for defining their roles. Graham Lane, chair of the National Employers Organisation for Schoolteachers, who sits on the local authority and unions working group that has been exploring the issue, said good progress was made at a meeting at the end of last month attended by representatives of Unison, the GMB and the T&G. The unions will consider the draft framework and then present it to the national body for local government, the Joint Negotiating Committee, and to the education secretary, Estelle Morris.

Graham Lane, chair of the National Employers Organisation for Schoolteachers, who sits on the local authority and unions working group that has been exploring the issue, said good progress was made at a meeting at the end of last month attended by representatives of Unison, the GMB and the T&G. The unions will consider the draft framework and then present it to the national body for local government, the Joint Negotiating Committee, and to the education secretary, Estelle Morris.

Mr Lane said he expected that local authorities will begin to use the framework from this autumn as they evaluate classroom assistants' jobs as part of the single status agreement, under which all local authority employees are being brought into a unified grading system. He stressed that classroom assistants were set to be 'the big gainers' from single status.

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