Nursery World - Staff suffer in term-time jobs

The cost to the term-time workforce of being female-dominated is revealed in a new report from the public services union Unison. According to the report, Taking the lid off term-time working in education, published last week, more than one-third of people working in education - at least 250,000 workers - are on term-time contracts, and more than 92 per cent of term-time staff working in schools are women. They tend to be low paid, have poor employment contracts and be subject to sex discrimination.

According to the report, Taking the lid off term-time working in education, published last week, more than one-third of people working in education - at least 250,000 workers - are on term-time contracts, and more than 92 per cent of term-time staff working in schools are women. They tend to be low paid, have poor employment contracts and be subject to sex discrimination.

The report said that there was still an 'unspoken belief' in society that term-time work was just '"pin-money" jobs to "occupy" wives and mothers', even though people were not necessarily term-time workers through choice.

The report's author, Christine Lewis of Unison, said, 'It's not just that most of the employees affected are women. It's more than sex discrimination, it's maternal discrimination, if you like, because people have these jobs because they are mothers.'

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