Schools face £4m bill for unpaid wages (From Swindon Advertiser)

Schools face £4m bill for unpaid wages

6:21pm Thursday 11th March 2010

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SWINDON schools face a bill of nearly £4m in equal pay settlements.

Headteachers decided at a Schools Forum meeting on Tuesday to defer the start of this payment for women who have been underpaid compared to male colleagues for a year using a £300,000 instalment.

However, from the 2011/2012 financial year schools face a payment of nearly £180,000 each year divided between them for the next 20 years.

This will be matched by an equal sum from the retained Designated Schools Grant (DSG).

During the meeting at the Civic Offices, Paddy Bradley, director of schools and learning, said: “The use of the £300,000 delays payment until 2011 then it’s a 50/50 split.

“There’s no impact till 2011/2012.”

The equal pay compensation concerns teaching assistants and support staff, which could include administrative staff such as secretaries and catering staff.

Teachers are not included in the dispute over equal pay because their salary comes above the threshold for consideration.

In total 2,724, mainly female, council workers received letters offering between £100 and £7,000 to compensate them for underpayment over the last six years.

The total cost of claims for compensation payments on non-litigated cases in schools is £3,977,040.

Swindon council will initially pay the claims and the schools will pay it back gradually.

At the meeting headteachers voted in favour of a “mortgage holiday” plan.

This means a £300,000 backdated National Non Domestic Rate will be used to delay the school annual payments.

After this the annual debt repayment and interest costs are charged 50 per cent to the school’s individual budgets, totalling £179,944, and 50 per cent to the retained DSG budget.

The annual Dedicated Schools Grant from the Department of Children Schools and Families totals around £116m, of which 87 per cent is given directly to schools while 13 per cent is retained for services such as home tutoring or out of area provision.

Nick Capstick, headteacher at Drove Primary School, is on the sub group that made the recommendations. He said the decision to defer took into account Swindon schools’ agreement to take a budget cut of £1m between them this financial year to pay off a £500,000 shortfall in last year’s education budget.

He said: “It’s about looking at the whole package.”

He added that the sub group would now continue to work with local authority officers to look at the cost of equal pay and how to reduce next year’s funding shortfall.

After the meeting Mr Bradley said: “There is a certain logic to saying let’s not change our budget planning, let’s use this £300,000 then we can start planning how to pay this. Everyone knows 2011/2012 is going to be a tough year financially.”

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