The single status agreement involves a re-evaluation of all local authority posts to harmonise payscales. The agreement was to have been implemented by 1 April 2002, but few local authorities are likely to achieve this and negotiations are underway about extending the deadline.
However, Unison's nursery nurse working group has doubts about whether the single status negotiations are going to benefit nursery nurses anyway. Their views on the possible benefits of opting out have not yet been put to the membership, which would be a necessary next step if this was to become part of the union's campaigning strategy.
Carol Ball, chair of the nursery nurses' working party, said that re-evaluating nursery nurses' jobs under the single status guidelines might not leave them significantly better off, and even if it did, local authorities have not been allocated cash to fund higher wages afterwards.
'Nursery nurses' jobs have not been re-evaluated since 1988,' said Ms Ball. 'Because the job evaluation scheme is generic and not specific to the job we do, we feel that it will not identify our job correctly and place the correct weighting on it.'
Unison submitted a pay claim to the Scottish Joint Negotiating Council, which includes representatives of unions and local authorities, on 7 September. This put forward draft job descriptions for the roles of nursery nurse, senior nursery nurse, deputy head and head of establishment, with salaries ranging from 16,173 to 33,483. Ms Ball said the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, the employers' organisation, had not rejected the pay claim out of hand, but had responded by saying there was no mechanism for negotiating a national claim for nursery nurses because of the single status agreement, under which each local authority carries out its own evaluation.
Nursery nurse members of Unison have also gathered 20,000 signatures supporting a petition calling on the Scottish Executive to set up a review of early years education and childcare similar to the McCrone inquiry into teaching. They plan to present this to the Scottish Parliament's public petitions committee. The union has secured a commitment that the education minister, now Cathy Jamieson (see below), will meet representatives to discuss the issues.
Ms Ball said that she and two other members of the nursery nurse working group had a long and fruitful meeting with civil servants from the Executive recently, discussing the shape a review of early years might take.
She said, 'If early years education and childcare is a priority and the Scottish Executive wants quality services, that costs money, and they have to fund local authorities and the private sector to be able to do that. I don't think it matters whether you are in the private or public sector, you should get the same money.'
During the meeting Ms Ball also raised concerns about children in full daycare, arguing that this required high ratios of staff to children. 'I know we are trying to meet the needs of the parents, but what about the needs of the child? A child can end up with a longer day than a parent's. That needs to be properly resourced, and the staffing needs to be such that the child can be taken out and go to the shops and so on. Otherwise we are in danger of institutionalising children and not meeting their needs.'
