While the Government is planning to expand the role of school support staff, particularly teaching assistants, their union says the predominantly female workforce still faces discrimination and low pay.
Unison's 2002 poll of support staff, conducted by NOP, found that two-thirds are on term-time contracts, and about half are on temporary or variable contracts. Term-time contracts mean that these employees lose out on leave entitlement, maternity and sick pay and pensions, the union's briefing document for the commission states.
The briefing document says, 'Nursery nurses struggled in the past to achieve pay and conditions commensurate with their skills and professionalism. Too often now, their full-year contracts are under attack.
Moving a nursery nurse to a term-time contract equates to a 20 per cent pay cut.'
It adds, 'As management and budgetary control of schools has gone local, there has been increasing diversity in contract types, pay and conditions of service. But the freedom which schools have to determine grading and other conditions of service impedes the protection of authority-wide employment practice.'
The NOP survey, which also involved a range of other staff including catering, cleaners, technicians, caretakers and secretaries, showed that only 34 per cent of nursery nurses and 27 per cent of teaching assistants have their own personal training plan.
It found that 49 per cent of nursery nurses and 41 per cent of teaching assistants are working up to ten hours a week outside of their contracted hours without compensation.
Unison points to the research undertaken among local education authorities last year by the Labour Research Department showing that pay for teaching assistants ranged from 9,912 to a maximum of 12,390.
The 2002/2003 Independent Data Services survey of pay in the public sector showed that nursery nurses earned an average 5.52 an hour and teaching assistants 5.34 an hour. But the survey suggested that 80 per cent of teaching assistants are on term-time contracts and therefore they earn less than the published rates.
