Early years staff fear they will lose out in the current regrading of pay and status for council employees - but, says Mary Evans , some may shine in the evaluation
Union leaders are pressing for a fair deal and full recognition of the professional skills and duties of nursery nurses in the job evaluation and regrading exercise being undertaken by councils across the country.
Local government is overhauling the raft of different pay and employment systems traditionally operated for blue-collar and white-collar workers. Under the Single Status Agreement, reached three years ago, each council is re-evaluating all its workers' jobs and putting them together on one pay spine. The idea is to iron out anomalies and reduce the burden of bureaucracy. The deadline for the completion of the re-evaluation exercise is April 2002.
Once a council has graded all its jobs it can set terms, conditions and specific pay rates. There have been reports that some employers have proposed changing nursery nurses' job titles to family workers, or reclassifying their hours from full to part-time, or restricting their employment to term-time only.
Local authorities are making progress at different speeds and are using different job evaluation schemes so it is proving hard for the workers' representatives to gain a complete overview of what is happening across the country.
However, some nursery nurses are clearly losing out. Nursery nurses from all over the country recently attended a conference in London on Changes in Childcare. One of the participants, Katharine Griffiths, from Leicester, says, 'I couldn't believe my ears. People were standing up and describing what was happening in their area and how different working practices were being thrust upon them and how they were not getting a good deal.'
Teachers are excluded from the regrading and the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses (PANN) and Unison, Britain's biggest trades union, are concerned that the exercise will create an even greater divide between teachers and nursery nurses.
Alison Johnston, PANN professional officer, says, 'What concerns us is that in some areas there appears to be a grouping together of so-called 'like groups' of workers without any recognition of individual qualifications, expertise and knowledge.'
She adds that, nursery nurses with the qualifications and experience necessary to meet the needs of very young children have found themselves evaluated alongside unqualified local government employees.
'Nursery nurses work in partnership with teachers in the provision of the curriculum and in liaising with parents and their role should be recognised. We think their pay should be set on a scale as a percentage of teachers' salaries.'
In a bid to clarify what is happening and to protect the position of its members, Unison's senior national officer for education staff, Christina McAnea, says it has launched a database to collate information on the progress of the Single Status Agreement. And it is calling on the Local Government Employers' Organisation to set up a joint working party on how re-evaluation will affect school-based staff.
She explains that the union is fighting on several fronts. 'Some local authorities are trying to pay them in term time only, but we are resisting that. It would create a two-tier system with teachers. Most parents and children can hardly tell the difference between the nursery nurses and the teachers, and it is appalling that they are paid so much less.'
The union is contesting the Government's change in the rules for the Job seekers' Allowance. Education workers on term-time-only pay have had their right to claim the allowance in the holidays withdrawn, but Unison is advising its members to continue to claim it until the issue is decided by the House of Lords.
Ms McAnea is urging the employers to sit down with the union and devise some national guidance. 'As we know, there is a big emphasis on early years education and they are going to be recruiting more staff,' she says. 'We are getting indications that there could well be a big recruitment crisis by September. If people have been unable to claim Jobseekers' Allowance during the holidays they will have to find other work and won't come back into the schools.'
Some councils compare the hours worked by nursery nurses (32.5 hours a week, and 195 days a year) with the standard working week (35, 36 and 37 hours) of their other employees. They argue that nursery nurses are part-timers and not full-time, with the consequent reduction of benefits and rights such a ruling carries.
Ms McAnea says,'Unless there is a significant pay increase involved in their regrading, they would lose money too. We know that in some authorities that have gone through regrading, nursery nurses have done well. They have been traditionally low paid and undervalued and in job evaluation they come out higher because of the skills, expertise and qualifications they have.'
But she stresses that if nursery nurses fail to fare well in their job re-evaluation, they can resort to equal pay claims. One precedent is the four nursery nurses in Gloucestershire who successfully claimed against their employer in 1997 that they merited equal pay with a male comparator undertaking a different job than theirs.
