County Durham Teaching Assistants (TAs) have rejected the latest contract offer from Durham County Council (DCC) after a consultative ballot with their unions.
Both UNISON and ATL members, who represent the majority of the county’s teaching assistants, rejected the offer, which had been criticised by campaigners as “rushed”, “confusing” and “ill thought out”.
Chief among the criticisms was that after new job descriptions were provided, which TAs helped write, the core body of TAs (Level 3) were evaluated at a grade lower than their current pay scale.
TAs claim that DCC have repeatedly denied requests for the points scores which led to the unexpected evaluation.
However, DCC chose instead to mitigate against the low scores by regrading all Level 3 TAs to the equivalent of Enhanced TAs, meaning they would now have to teach a full class at least once a week although they have not been trained to teach and were not previously expected to.
Enhanced TAs, meanwhile, would have no higher grade to move to so would be unable to mitigate for a significant loss of pay.
A total of 472 – over 20% of the TA workforce – would have lost pay under the proposals.
TAs also cited confusion about their new contracted hours as a reason for rejecting the offer.
DCC claimed the new contracts included a ‘flexible’ 37 hours per week and 40 weeks per year, with the new additional hours expected to be included from extra-curricular work already undertaken by TAs, but many TAs reported that head teachers were insisting that the new hours would be timetabled.
Gillian Iveson, spokesperson for County Durham Teaching Assistant Activists said: “A lot of good work has been done so it is a shame that DCC and UNISON rushed the final proposal when we were so close to achieving a good deal for everyone.
“We warned that the deal would be seen as unfair and now the unions and DCC really must listen to us if they want this dispute resolved to everyone, including the council’s benefit.
“The council need to stop hiding information and hiding behind confidentiality clauses. We only have one chance to get this deal right so that the future of Durham TAs is permanently secured.
“We didn’t want to go into another summer of stress and worry but we would rather delay and achieve the right outcome than leave almost 500 colleagues behind.”
Ken Smith, Regional Official for ATL, said: “ATL members have shown that they are not prepared to accept this poor offer from Durham County Council.
“We will now do all we can to support those members affected and will be approaching UNISON with a view to pursuing a joint way forward.”
Durham Miners’ Association, who have invited TAs to march with them for the past two years at the Durham Miners’ Gala, Europe’s largest union gathering, said: “We fully support this democratic decision and will continue to give the Durham Teaching Assistants our unwavering solidarity.
“We urge the Council to take note of this and come back with an improved offer so that this dispute can be resolved fairly.”
John Hewitt – Corporate Director for Resources at Durham County Council – said: “We recognise the result of the UNISON ballot. We will continue to work with the recognised trade unions to consider next steps and how we move forward.”
UNISON were unavailable for comment before The Crier went to press.