 Schools
Remodelling:
No Funding! No
Deal!
The government has brought in an Agreement that
seeks to cheapen teaching costs in schools and to use our members as the
battering ram!
Despite government claims to have boosted funding
for schools, they will face a funding shortfall of £1 billion over the
next three years.
Last year, English primary schools lost 800
teachers who were not replaced. Overall, there is a national teacher
shortage of around 10,000.
Rather than seek to improve teachers pay and
conditions, New Labour is making up the difference by allowing schools to
engage our members as Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTA’s) or even
cover supervisors.
Scandalous
Scandalously, there is no guaranteed national pay
rate, or even agreed job description. That is not even left to local
councils to sort out, but is being left to individual schools.
Without enough funds and the protection of a
national agreement, different pay rates and conditions of service are
being imposed on our members, too often without proper consultation.
In Nottingham, headteachers are writing their own
job descriptions, in Islington our members are being issued with
redundancy notices rather than ‘new challenges’, all over the country
HLTA’s are being awarded ‘status’ through extra training without any
guarantees of a job!
Every time local activists challenge the gross
inequalities of the remodelling scheme, we are told that Unison is a
signatory.
The union has lost enormous credibility by
signing what is in effect a blank cheque, without proper or democratic
consultation with the members.
Absolutely clear
It is now absolutely clear that there isn’t the
funding to make remodelling a reality.
Our members are now already taking classes,
marking work, organising special needs without proper recognition or
decent pay. Last year, Dave Prentis said if the funding wasn’t there, we
would withdraw from the Agreement or even take industrial action.
Well, Dave, even the Headteachers Association
(NAHT) has said it will withdraw if the funding is not in place by
December! We have been sold a dummy and we must free the union from the
shackles of the Agreement now.
The average pay of our Teaching Assistant members
is still less than £10,000 a year.
They continue to face job insecurity, term-time
pay, and second class status in our schools.
Serious national campaign
It is time the union launched a serious national
campaign for decent rates of pay together with all year round contracts
for all our support staff members. It can’t be left to local branches to
salvage what they can from a poor Agreement, which is what appears to be
the strategy at the moment.
A national campaign, including if necessary
industrial action, will mobilise a massive force of mainly low paid women
who would be a force to reckon with!
Successful local campaigns in London,
Nottingham, Kirklees Northern Ireland and recently the Nursery Nurses
strike in Scotland show there is a determination to fight. We call for:
-
Renegotiation of National Remodelling
Agreement
-
No Agreement without national rates of pay
and Job Descriptions, properly rewarded
-
A clearly defined career structure, with
proper training and support
-
Paid time off to gain the training and
expertise
-
An end to temporary contracts
-
52 week contracts for all support staff.
-
An end to job insecurity, with the
guarantee of secure redeployment where a job has been exhausted in a
particular school
-
Bring an end to LMS and return education
funding to democratically elected LEA’s
-
For a campaign of industrial action to
force the government to properly recognise the worth of school support
staff
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