A spokesperson for the GMB said that in many cases, school support staff were facing non-renewal of yearly contracts rather than redundancy, making it difficult to gauge the full extent of job losses. 'The Government's workforce agreement with the unions is meant to be tackling this by putting teaching assistants on proper contracts, but at the moment, the funding doesn't seem to match the philosophy. We're supportive of the philosophy, but the funding needs to be addressed.'
Christina McAnea, Unison's national secretary for education, said the union was carrying out a survey of its teaching assistant members to find out how many faced losing their jobs. She said, 'This time of year you always get a flurry of redundancy notices, and it's definitely higher than normal this year. Worryingly, we are also getting some reports of schools cutting teaching assistants' hours or replacing qualified nursery nurse staff with cheaper, non-qualified staff.'
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