Education Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I hope that no one in this House would for a moment argue that the value of teaching assistants is in any way diminished by what is happening. Because we value so highly teaching assistants and the work that they do does not seem to lead directly to the need for a national negotiating body for their pay. In fact, I would have thought that because of the wide variety of work that teaching assistants perform, there is a very strong argument for their being allowed to have different terms and conditions of service and different rates of pay according to the job that their employer wants them to do. As the number of academies and free schools is increasing, employers of such people will not be subject to national negotiations. Their employers will be the immediate school in which they are working. Most teachers value the opportunity to have flexible conditions for their teaching assistants so that they can use them for a whole range of things. As the noble Lord has just said, in some cases they are highly professional and the work that they do has national recognition. Others perform much more lowly roles. That is the choice of the school, the teachers the assistants work for and the employers who employ them. I would hope very much that we would recognise the value of teaching assistants more by allowing flexibility than by any rigid national code.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I agree with what has been said about the importance and value of support staff. There are several such people in my own family and I know what a good and important job they do. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will agree with that when he responds. I am a little surprised that the Government are ignoring the recommendation of the ASCL. That is rather unusual. I hope that my noble friend will explain how the proposed system will be better.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, as we said in Grand Committee, a debate about the value of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body should not be confused with a debate on the value of support staff themselves. We all agree that support staff have a vital part to play in the life of their schools. There is no disagreement on that score with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, or the noble Lord, Lord Knight. However, we do disagree, as my noble friend Lady Perry set out, over whether we should set up a new piece of control machinery to determine the pay and conditions of school support staff or whether we should stick with local decision-making by employers, local authorities and schools which best know local conditions.

Organisations representing employers of support staff, such as the Local Government Group, take the latter view. The group draws its members from across the political spectrum and is a firm supporter of the Government’s decision to abolish the SSSNB. If we retain the SSSNB and act on any agreements it reaches, schools would be required to review the pay and conditions of more than half a million support staff, requiring a massive investment of time by schools. The impact assessment that accompanied the ASCL Bill suggested that this might take more than 200,000 hours of head teacher or senior leadership time alone—time that we think could be better spent on pupils and their learning.

We should also remember that for the majority of support staff working in community and voluntary controlled schools, there is already a national pay and conditions framework in place, the Green Book. This long-standing voluntary agreement negotiated by the Local Government Employers, UNISON, GMB and Unite is already used for those staff in all but three local authorities. Of course, in all schools, existing employment law ensures that individuals are treated equally with regard to their terms and conditions when assessed against their colleagues.

In Committee my noble friend Lady Walmsley asked whether the SSSNB could be allowed time to complete part of its work, believing that the results of its work would be useful if made available for schools to choose to use. In response to that and to her other point, the SSSNB process is not that flexible. The Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 sets out the process that must be followed once the SSSNB has reached an agreement. That process can involve many twists and turns, allowing the Secretary of State to request the SSSNB to reconsider agreements that it has submitted to him. However, ultimately it requires the Secretary of State to make an order that is binding on schools and local authorities in respect of how they determine the pay and conditions of their support staff. It is that rigid legislation that this clause seeks to abolish.

However, we agree with my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Perry that some of the materials the SSSNB has begun to develop could be a useful optional reference tool. We also know that the trade union members of the SSSNB are keen to continue to work with support staff employer organisations independently of government to complete a set of job role profiles for support staff. That is why we have already agreed to arrange for the intellectual property rights—in other words, the copyright—of all materials that are owned by the Department for Education to be reassigned to Local Government Employers. This means the materials can then be used freely by the unions and employers that made up the membership of the SSSNB.

When the Secretary of State met the three unions that represent school support staff—UNISON, Unite and GMB—on 12 October, he was able to confirm that unions, together with the other SSSNB member organisations that represent employers, already own the materials developed during the final months of the SSSNB activity. This means that they are free to work with employer organisations to finalise the job role profiles. This is the piece of work that unions and employers agree will be of most use to schools. Abolishing the SSSNB will spare schools from the burden of a wholesale review of support staff pay and allow them to keep the level of freedom they currently have in relation to support staff pay. It is right that we do all that we can to ensure that the good work that SSSNB member organisations have done so far is not wasted. On that basis I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.