The petition, which was signed by twice as many people as there are nursery nurse members of Unison in Scotland, calls on the Scottish Executive to recognise early years education and childcare as a separate profession within the education sector, to standardise qualifications and to set up a national inquiry. It will be passed on to the Scottish Parliament's public petitions committee, which is currently in recess until September.
Carol Ball, chair of Unison's nursery nurse working group, said, 'We want ministers and MSPs to conduct a thorough review of the sector, recognise it as a separate and valued profession and make recommendations on career development issues.
'The huge number of people who have signed our petition recognise the importance of nursery nurses. Margaret Jamieson, whose daughter is a student nursery nurse, also recognises the importance of this and we are delighted that she has agreed to accept our petition. We hope the public petitions committee will agree and put pressure on the Executive to conduct the review.'
She said the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), the employers' organisation, has agreed to form a working party with the relevant unions to discuss nursery nurses' career structure, pay and conditions.
This is a U-turn from COSLA, which had argued that nursery nurses' pay and conditions should be dealt with by individual local authorities through the implementation of the single status agreement, which seeks to harmonise council payscales.
Unison submitted a national nursery nurses' pay claim last September which was rejected on the grounds that there was no mechanism for discussing a national claim. The union responded by submitting the same claim to all Scotland's local authorities in February 2002.
Ms Ball said the combination of this strategy and delays to the implementation of the single status agreement appeared to have brought COSLA to the negotiating table and said she hoped discussions would begin in August.
She added, 'The downside is that any agreement reached on a national grading and job description would only be active until jobs are evaluated under the single status agreement. If the talks break down, we will select a form of industrial action.'
