school budget cuts...just been fired! Help

[miniplaty]

Posting here for traffic....I've just been told that from September I will no longer have a job. I work part time in a primary school on a fixed term contract until August, this is the second year I have been on a fixed term contract. I've been doing PPA (lesson cover whilst class teachers do planning) and my job is going to be done by a classroom assistant. Can they do this? Is it legal to employ a teacher for 2 years on fixed term contracts and then get rid of them to be replaced by an HLTA? The post will be the same, it's not as if the post will be removed, but it will be done by someone cheaper. Thanks :(

I am amazed some think it is ok for unqualified staff to be teaching our children!

Private school teachers don't always have a teaching 'qualification' like a PGCE or degree in teaching specifically. Owning a bit of paper saying you're qualified to teach doesn't make you a good teacher... a TA with a subject degree is no less qualified than a teacher with a degree in primary education - teaching is a skill not a qualification!

No, because they won't necessarily be doing all the planning that goes along side it but it would make sense to pay them something extra when they do act as supply or ppa cover.

maggiethemagpie Teachers one year contracts run from 1st Sept to 31 Aug. There is no break of service when you run two of these together. Even if the school try to make a break by ending the first contract early for example it is deemed to be deliberately avoiding giving employment rights and teachers have won cases like that in court.
The teacher in this case should have the same rights as anyone else who has been employed for 2 consecutive years. Those are not to be unfairly dismissed and to redundancy pay if the job disappears. It hasn't disappeared as a TA is going to do it so the teacher could argue that they had been unfairly dismissed. The fact that the contracts were fixed term is irrelevant once you reach two years.

"a TA with a subject degree is no less qualified than a teacher with a degree in primary education - teaching is a skill not a qualification!"

Yes, a skill you need training in surely?

a TA with a subject degree is no less qualified than a teacher with a degree in primary education

A teacher with a teaching qualification is by definition more qualified to teach than a TA without a teaching qualification.

Call your union. The school are acting illegally. You will have redundancy rights. These people saying otherwise are entirely wrong. There is a period of consultation before this process is enacted.

a TA with a subject degree is no less qualified than a teacher with a degree in primary education

A teacher is trained in teaching. Primary teachers with subject degrees still do teacher training as part of their pgce/scitt etc.

They are no less educated though and ultimately you've got a lot of people with teaching qualifications who may have been learnt how to teach but are still not very good at it v. people who are more than capable to teach but are labelled as lower grade. Why else would top private schools take graduates without teaching qualifications? Perhaps the work 'ability' is more relevant than 'skill' here...

I've just looked it up on ACAS and it states that someone on a fixed term contract of two years may be entitled to the same redundancy rights as a permanent employee, as Sarah says.

The issue is that the post is not redundant, someone else will do it, presumably someone already working in the school. I think the OP should contact her union and consider a claim for unfair dismissal.

A teacher is trained in teaching. Primary teachers with subject degrees still do teacher training as part of their pgce/scitt etc.

My point is that it's only the state sector that requires the further training on top of a subject degree.

Why should we be wishing for untrained teachers to be teaching children? I don't get it.

Schools aren't doing this because there's a huge supply of amazing teachers who don't happen to be qualified. It's because they're cheaper.

Would I rather have my PPA covered by my TA - who knows the children inside out, and works alongside me for 9/10 of the week - or have a qualified teacher who comes in for a couple of hours one afternoon a week?

It depends. If the teacher is a subject specialist - e.g. French, Music, Games - then it is possibly better to have the qualified teacher. For almost everything else, particularly if the PPA cover is doing a lesson that is part of a series taught that week (e.g. an English lesson which follows the previous day's, or a History lesson which fits into a series of 2 per week for half a term), then the TA is probably in a better position to deliver that lesson appropriately, and to feed back to me anything I need to know to teach the next lesson in the series.

ASs it happens, my TA is a graduate with a PGCSE who is not in a position to take up a teaching post due to family commitments. However, my comments would be the same for virtually any decent classroom TA. As for planning, for most 'core' subjects we plan a term's worth at a time for the whole year group (weekly only for English and Maths, >1 form entry) so the extra planning burden of teaching a lesson for a TA who knows you and the class for PPA cover is pretty minimal.

So in this scenario - primary PE lessons need covering - who would you prefer to teach your child?

1. TA with sports degree but no PGCE
2. qualified primary teacher with no interest in sport

he thing is that A post - or a task - is disappearing - if it is a TA already employed in the school, then the job they would otherwise be doing is technically the one disappearing ... which is the post being made redundant? You have 2 people who could be doing the 1 task out of 2 that the school has decided will continue to be done - how does the law stand on whether it is the person on a temporary contract not renewed or the person on the permanent TA contract whose 'other' job is disappearing who should do it?

Peppa,

1. I am number 2, and do teach PE entirely adequately, but I know my TA colleague who is employed specifically to cover PPA with PE is MUCH better at it than I am.

I think the gap between 'teacher' and 'TA' is not as wide as e.g. when the OP compared it to dentists vs dental hygienist doing root canal work.

It also depends on what the lesson is being taught.

Would I want my TA to introduce a totally new concept in e.g. Maths for the first time? No, probably not. Would I be happy with her supervising a lesson in which the class practised a Maths skill that they had already been explicitly taught, or completed an art piece, or listened to the next chapter of the class book relevant to the lesson tomorrow, or did handwriting or sentence work or finished writing a story or did games or rehearsed the songs for a show? I am not saying that it makes no difference whether a teacher or a TA teaches a lesson, but lessons can be planned so that difference is absolutely minimised, and the difference is often compensated for by the deep knowledge that the TA will have of the needs of the children in that class.

(And I think, when push comes to shove, there are better ways of spending the difference in cost per year between a TA for an afternoon once a week vs a teacher for an afternoon, in terms of accelerating, or at least not retarding, the learning of the class)

What really amuses me is that until very recently very few teachers in the private sector were qualified yet people are prepared to pay for their children to be taught by such people but in the state sector, where many TAs and HLTAs are graduates often with child care/work experience are being denounced as unsuitable. Clearly the situation the OP faces is undesirable but she has accepted 2 x 1 year fixed term contracts. She may have been given the impression that it would eventually become permanent but in reality she should not have assumed that to be the case in the current financial situation. In her place I would now be using my energies to explore other vacancies elsewhere.

An employment lawyer has already clarified upthread that sequential fixed term contracts are not a way of employers avoiding their statutory obligations to the employee. Indeed, in a university context, when I was a fixed term researcher the funding body paid the university a sum that reflected the obligation to pay redundancy amongst other benefits. In this instance, the employer will have been aware of their statutory obligations when budgeting for the role. Like any other employee, over two years of employment and your employer should seek to look for an alternative post in the first instance and then pay redundancy if one can't be found. So no, the OP doesn't need to 'get a grip' but she does need to find out the calendar dates of her contracts...

why else would top private schools take graduates without teaching qualifications?

Evidence?

Granted, my evidence is anecdotal but I have yet to come across someone who recruits in education who doesn't stress the desire for a PGCE or equivalent training as something they look for when shortlisting. Where children are being taught by unqualified teachers you will probably find the job was filled that way because there was no choice. That is not the same as actively recruiting people who are unqualified.

I am perturbed by the 'any fool can do the job' attitude being posted here. By more than one person. Sadly no longer surprised. Does it not bother you as parents that you are actively seeking to have our education system flushed down the pan? Surely you want some kind of quality assurance?

What really amuses me is that until very recently very few teachers in the private sector were qualified

Again, I would ask for your evidence of this.

Round here PPA has been covered by TAs for years.

Exactly, Dancing. PPA is - IME - almost always in the afternoon, once English, Maths, Phonics, probably Guided Reading etc if done have been taught.

The educational gap between a TA who knows the class teaching e.g. Games or finishing Art, or reading the class book, even delivering a planned History or RE or Music lesson, and a teacher who only teaches the class for that 90 minutes per week doing so, is genuinely not dramatic.

That is entirely different to a TA teaching whole days to cover absence. But 100 minutes per week? Not a big deal.

OP, contact your union, they will be able to advise (and represent).

In most of the schools I worked in PPA was covered by TA's. One school covered it by having a teacher to cover French lessons and she covered a chunk of PPA time. Another had a PE teacher. Mostly, though, it was TA's.

I don't think that's entirely relevant in the OP's case. It sounds similar to what happened to me when a school just decided not to renew my contract. They got someone different in to do it the next year, as was their right. It wasn't a co-incidence that the same school tended to change fixed contract staff in my role shortly before they hit the two years, but there was nothing I could do about it.