Children & Young People
Schools NEWS
This page contains information relating to the Schools section of the department. The more general C&YP page is here
Updated 28th Feb 2011
School JE Information - JE Results info
UNISON response to Notts County Council Letter re Change to Terms and Conditions - letter to members - letter to Council
INCREASE IN TEACHING ASSISTANT WORKING HOURS AND AN END TO ALL YEAR ROUND PAY IN NOTTINGHAM CITY
You may have heard on the radio or read in the paper that Teaching Assistants in the City are facing an increase in their working hours and an end to all year round pay.
THIS HAS NOT BEEN AGREED WITH UNISON!
TA’s in the City are being encouraged to enlist the support of their Governors to make the council rethink, there is also a lobby being planned by thier branch – details on the Nottingham City UNISON website.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE COUNTY SCHOOLS? Currently the position in Nottinghamshire County schools is that full time hours for TA’s are 32.5 per week and pay is all year round. Please ensure that all staff at your school are members of UNISON as the more members we have in schools, the louder we speak when we talk with management at County Hall and the stronger your position is should they decide to try and follow the lead of the City Council. You can join Notts County UNISON here.
REDUNDANCY ALERT
If your school suggests that a job group should cut their hours instead of going through the appendix 2 and skills audit procedure, please get in touch with UNISON straight away, as although it may seem staightforward in the beginning, things can go wrong along the way.
Some of the pitfalls are:
1) Intimidation by the Head Teacher
2) Group members may agree to cutting hours when they cannot afford to, or they may feel pressured to by the group.
3) When the hours are agreed your Head Teacher may dictate when your hours are used in school and this is very likely to be to the school's advantage and not yours, leaving you very unhappy.
So far we have only heard from members when things go wrong and unfortunately by then it can be too late to rectify the problem. Contact us NOW!
Summer Schools newsletter download here (524k)
Government under fire as scale of demand for academies emerges -
Only 153 schools apply despite Goventment claims of more than 1000 -
Guardian article 30 July 10
UNISON is stepping up it's campaign against Academies - see here
Link to Schools page on UNISON National website includes updates on the national newsletter for Schools and info on SSSNB.
here's the link to the previous page for School info which includes info on the National Framework for School Support Staff and Advice re Job Evaluation in Schools.
Social Care Work
Cutting caseloads would save lives says UNISON
UNISON, the UK’s leading public trade union, today reiterated its call for strict controls on social work caseloads, after a new report* showed just one in five social workers thought they had enough time to work effectively with the children they are responsible for. Only 25% said their employer had an effective caseload management system.
The report also highlights a climate of fear with practitioners too scared to say they can’t cope with the volume of work for fear of being disciplined. It reveals a gulf in understanding between social workers and team leaders, and those in senior management who do not listen to what they have to say. The union is also calling for employers to have a duty to respond to social workers’ concerns.
Helga Pile, UNISON national officer for social workers, said:
“Social work departments are massively overstretched, and the pressure on staff is unsustainable. Excessive caseloads are a perennial problem, and this survey proves that leaving caseload management to chance is not working. What’s more it is dangerous, just as the tragic cases hitting the headlines prove.
“How can anyone say everything possible is being done to protect children, families and vulnerable adults if employers are allowed to go on loading more and more cases on to social workers? We must now move to enforceable national standards for caseloads, and better workload management systems.
“Only a third of social workers feel they can have a say in how their service is run. Yet these professionals are expected to cope with one of the toughest jobs going dealing with problems most people don’t even want to think about. Employers and the government have got to start taking social workers’ views seriously. We want clear duties on employers to make sure that not only are the issues heard, but they are acted on.
“The real barrier to boosting social work is underfunding. We cannot allow more lives to be swept away in the cuts that threaten to engulf local services.”
In Notts, Unison is vigourously pursuing this issue and all aspects of the "Health check" ,which is recommendation 6 of the Social Work Task Force. We proposed at JCNP and Management accepted,that there would be a Joint Trade Union/ Management Working Party to look at how the Health Check could be inplemented in Notts. We have had two meetings to date with further meetings to follow. We will be insisting that there is full involvement of Social workers in this process to gain a realistic picture of how things are.
We know full well that although there has been a caseload weighting system in place for several months,that it has by no means resolved the issue of many workers having too high caseloads and working inordinately long hours. Given the continuing huge increase in referrals and record numbers of children in care this problem is only likely to get worse unless there is a big increase in the f.t.e establishment of Social workers and not just the knee jerk response of recruiting agency workers.