SCHOOLS could inherit billions of pounds’ worth of equal pay claims under Labour’s plans to transfer up to 200,000 school support staff from local authorities into academies, unions warned today.

The leaders of Unison, Unite and GMB today slammed ministers for pushing ahead with academisation before replacing a national framework for job evaluations and pay that currently exists within councils.

Department for Education (DfE) officials admitted that they no longer planned such a framework during this parliament in a meeting with unions last month, the Morning Star has been told.

This has ramped up union campaigning for Labour to deliver changes to the Equality Act that would see academies inherit massive equal pay claim liabilities from the predominantly female workforce’s former employers.

Today in a joint letter to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, general secretaries Gary Smith, Andrea Egan and Sharon Graham warned against the “continued expansion of academisation” and said that unless things change “we will have no option but to escalate our response publicly and industrially.”

Their letter says: “The joint trade unions campaigned extensively over many years to re-establish the School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSSNB).  

“We did so in good faith because we knew it was our best and long overdue opportunity to address the deep-rooted inequalities, fragmentation, and inconsistency experienced by school support staff across England.”

At an SSSNB Working Group meeting on May 20, “it was extremely disappointing to be informed that the remit for the SSSNB in its first year would be very limited,” it adds. 

“The continued expansion of academy trust structures, in the absence of a coherent national framework for school support staff, risks accelerating workforce fragmentation.

“Should meaningful progress continue to be absent, we will have no option but to escalate our response publicly and industrially, including at upcoming conferences over the summer period.”

Speaking to the Morning Star at GMB’s conference in Blackpool today, national officer for schools and academies Stacey Booth said that government officials confirmed that the SSSNB would not have the framework before the next general election at the meeting.

She said that ministers introduced a “no ceiling” clause to school staff pay while the Employment Rights Bill was progressing through Parliament last June.

“My heart sank. I knew at that moment, we’ve not got framework or evaluation,” she said.

“We are all really concerned because we understand: no framework, no job evaluation — it’s just going to be a free-for-all… and it’s designed to fit the system of academisation, private business.

“The problem we’ve got is academies… they don’t evaluate jobs for pay, they do what they want, they make jobs up” and workers will be “absolutely exploited because they will take them on from everywhere, they won’t have a proper evaluation system in place.”

GMB’s head of internal and industrial relations Rhea Wolfson said that Labour’s mass academisation of school workers is a “direct contradiction” to its manifesto commitment to end the use of outsourcing to get around equal pay. 

“You assume that means ‘don’t actively do more outsourcing,’ but there’s also — how we understand it — a commitment to fix the problem,” she added.

“There is a get-out clause that basically allows privatisation to be a way that you can effectively get out of your pay liabilities and we want to fix that within the Equality Act.”

Due to a six-month window after an employee is transferred into an academy for them to bring an equal pay claim, she said: “It has become a significantly more urgent priority with the announcement that hundreds of thousands of school workers are going to be privatised. 

“We already in theory have this solution but we haven’t seen any action on that commitment yet.”

She explained that unions are ramping up lobbying for changing the Equality Act to allow equal pay claims to be made based on comparisons with workers who have different employers but are ultimately funded by the same body, as with outsourced public services.

“Fundamentally you are the same group and you should be able to compare yourselves,” she said.

“We want to change it to have language closer to what Tupe [the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations] has, which is ‘services on behalf of,’ so it should mean that you can’t just privatise.”

Asked if the delays to changing the law would prevent equal pay claims being launched against the government, she added: “What we won’t be doing is sitting back and allowing that to happen. 

“We will escalate our campaigning significantly so that we try to protect as many workers as possible and that will transfer into the academies.

“We have written a letter warning the Secretary of State that there’s the potential of billions of pounds of liabilities transferring into those academies, and do those academies realise what they are taking on?

“I suspect they are going to be absolutely shocked to see what they have inherited. I’m going to try to warn them but that’s on them.”

The DfE was contacted for comment.