Is becoming an academy a way of preventing redundancies?

[loriesa]

I haven't a clue how it all works really.

I am support staff in a primary school. They have financial difficulties and have decided to make several staff redundant. We have to come up with an alternative plan to save our jobs. It's pretty impossible to do. Would becoming an academy help? Any other suggestions ?

From being in the middle of it at the moment, I'd say the Governors made their mind up before Christmas and there is very little that can be said other than in a couple of very specific cases.

If they're broke, they won't be allowed to academise, anyway - not unless they get the worst Inadequate/Special Measures, at which point, there will be a change of management anyway and all bets are off.

Make sure you have your union subs up to date, don't go to any meetings by yourself, even if you don't have a union - you need a witness, preferably one who doesn't stand to lose their job as well and you can get information from ACAS for free (and from GMB or Unison websites) to make sure you're informed enough to not get fucked over, as to people on over £60 grand (if not more) a year/can afford to 'help out as a governor' with their day job as director of finance, a bunch of women earning under £700/month mean absolutely nothing to them.

Depends if it's a school joining a MAT. That can happen where a school is broke as a way of improving chances for survival not can also lead to future redundancies as a MAT will look to restructure if it is inefficient. I'd be surprised if it would be able to convert as a single academy trust unless Ofsted and results are great. It would need to be a sponsored academy.

Job sharing could be an option so two people cutting their hours to keep their jobs - probably the most effective. Becoming an academy will not solve the issues. There are few savings you can make in a school to cover the cost of a member of staff and it's difficult to generate enough "extra" revenue hiring out the school and it's facilities to make much of a difference.

Nope. Money coming in remains the same; there are some cost savings to be made, but not enough.

The issue is that the government, while not cutting money, have not covered standard inflationary increases such as pay for staff, cost of services, meal costs; only their "headline" increases which are not guaranteed after 1-2 years.

Therefore, if you are a good school to work for, with long serving staff, it rapidly becomes uneconomical and redundancy is the only option.

Having been a school governor if is really not fair to say they don’t care about staff. They do, even if hey earn a lot. The Governors might not have acted quickly enough to cut their costs according to the reducing budgets. School budgets are predicted 3 years down the line so they should have acted earlier.

Being an academy doesn’t alter the budget or expenditure. The options may well be taken out of the Governors’ hands if they do become an academy. The MAT officers will take control.

What the school can do is: Get more children. Re arrange classes so there are around 30 in each, job share, offer part time working, ask for parental contributions, reduce lunch break, reduce hours of any non teaching staff and other larger items of expenditure should be looked at. However staffing costs are always the big one!

Schools should always benchmark their expenditure against other schools and the LA should facilitate this. So check if this has been done and then you can see where they stand against similar schools. If a school maintains less than optimum class sizes with generous help they need to look at it.

You cannot now become (usually) an academy as a single school, there is an expectation that you will become part of a MAT. If the school proposes becoming part of the MAT, then the MAT will carry put due diligence and putting a MAT hat on, why would they take on another school that is in serious financial difficulty? Another point is that in any MAT there will always be a financial top-slice to support the central systems of the MAT, so as a school you could easily be another 5% worse of financially in the short term.
The reality is that the school has to come up with a 3 year turn around plan, which is clearly if they are in serious financial difficulty something that should have been happening a long time ago. There may well be some cost savings within the school budget but with staff costs being 80%+ of the whole budget, the reality is that the only way to make substantial savings is to reduce staff. Sorry.
There is one major issue that you as a staff member needs to establish and that is who is paying the redundancy costs? It used to be the LA paid but now in many LAs the redundancy costs fall on the school. If it is the later then the school obviously has an even bigger bill to resolve and there might well need to be discussion over whether it is cost effective to make any staff redundant or it is better to rely on staff leaving the school voluntarily. Same scenario also could be the case for any staff who might be thinking of retiring early, that the school will need to pick up the financial cost of them leaving early.
There is no easy answer to this and each school's circumstances are different but they can be resolved with time and some thinking outside the box. Increasing the income to the school via more pupils etc is part of a long term solution but if the school is "full" in terms of pupils, it clearly indicates a school that has not kept their spending in check.
Another poster said make sure union are involved in meetings and this is sensible, though the rest of their comments over governors is rather biased, they will along with the SLT be desperate to find a way to resolve this without redundency.

You tend to be biased when there's no money to pay a small number of late middleaged women the £700 - £1400 a month they earn, but there's enough to afford massive retention payments for other staff (who will have no problems in getting alternative employment whilst maintaining their length of service) and bring in external consultants for training in new shiny computer packages that cost a fortune when it's not actually necessary to replace the existing systems.

Well so says you Mitz. How do you know the computer system didn’t need updating? Who gets retention payment? Shortage subject teachers? If you lose them, the pupils surely lose out! No school finds budgeting easy but in every organisation there has to be hard decisions taken on costs. No one finds this painless and everyone agonises over it.

Because I installed it, maintained it and trained others in how to use it, largely.

An analogy would be buying a brand new combine harvester when you live in a two bedroom ground floor flat in the middle of Leeds City Centre and use a Black and Decker strimmer to deal with your six foot by eight foot patch of nettles outside the back door. And you knew you couldn't afford to pay your mortgage before you signed the contract.

Well you’ll get a great job elsewhere then. You must have amazing skills that will be in demand. Most schools contract all that work out.

I'm not being made redundant yet as I've got specialist skills in a number of areas. But yes, I could get something else without too much problem with the additional experience/skill. This particular thing is not something that is dealt with by standard contractors or can be handled by calling a supply agency on a Monday morning when the need arises. It's certainly costing them more than the relevant proportion of my hours to change - but I suppose this goes in a different column on the accounts, so doesn't need to be scrutinised in the same way as the need to pay somebody a living wage to deal with the day to day tasks like dealing with kids and parents.

Doesn't change the fact that the Governors have targeted the poorest paid and solely female staff, though, and have been very blunt/cold about it to them.

I imagine (having gone through restructuring) that they are looking with a cold heart at what can afford to go.

Additional admin staff and TAs for non ECHP children are fairly high in the firing line if the choice is 'TA to every primary classroom and lose a teacher' or 'have a teacher per class and trim support staff'.

I'm not saying the job isn't valuable. I was support staff in school prior to teaching but that will be someone with their figures head on.

Some schools I know have forced PE/creative arts teachers to pick up additional hours teaching ks3 humanities in their timetable because it means after someone has left they don't have to employ another teacher because of budgets.

Even contracting out some stuff can be cheaper because the school won't be liable for sick pay, maternity pay etc.

The issue on retention payments is that the school's currency, so to speak, is it's outcomes, teaching and learning. Lose enough of your strong teachers and the quality of of teaching declines, behaviour standards declines, results decline and when a school is on that trajectory parents stop sending their children there so you have 75 spare places in y7. After a couple of years a school with 800 capacity has 600. Then Ofsted come in because it's a school in crisis & it gets slammed and more parents pull their children out and before you know it you've got a school at 50% capacity, most parents don't want their children there, lots of staff won't want to work there and then the school faces closure or being gobbled up into one of the mega trusts.

Restructures and potential redundancies are crap all round, but I think taking the view this is personal against a sub group of staff is a bit much. You need to have your union subs paid up to date and with the skills you've got ride it out.

I think you need to be realistic about the situation. If the school have a deficit then they need to take action to resolve that, they cannot just duck the issue.
Unfortunately the top priority will always be to have teachers in place and given that staffing is likely to be 80%+ of the expenditure, it is more or less inevitable that the school and the governing board will be looking hard at the teaching assistants in the school to see if cuts can be made there without looking at teacher reductions.
You asked about what can be done and I think that maybe attack is the best form of defence. The governing board is almost for sure targeting the non-teaching staff as they are usually easier to cut back but I would go on the attack about savings that can be made in the teaching staff. So for instance do the senior leadership team have a teaching commitment, if all the senior leadership team had a teaching commitment of 5 hours a week then this would start to make a difference. What is the teaching commitment of middle management, it should be at least 50%. When it comes to teaching staff what is their actual contact time with pupils, it should be somewhere between 80 and 90%, if it is not then that is time that the school is paying for someone not in contact with pupils. It is no use considering overall figures they are easy to fudge, it needs to be individual teachers and their contact time with pupils. The reality is usually that the more marginal the subject the more likely they are to have a lower teaching commitment. The argument has to be the school will remove the financial deficit quicker by looking at teacher reductions rather than TA reductions who have a 100% pupil contact time.

I would go on the attack about savings that can be made in the teaching staff
I wouldn't because the likelihood of someone not having the first clue about people's roles and directed tasks is quite high so going and telling a school to get rid of other staff is high risk and highly likely to backfire because who's going to want someone on the team who acts that way?
When it comes to teaching staff what is their actual contact time with pupils, it should be somewhere between 80 and 90%, if it is not then that is time that the school is paying for someone not in contact with pupils.
And yet does someone in school know what all their colleagues are directed to do in that time? Someone might not be teaching but be on behaviour on call, staffing isolation, in their link meetings with senior leadership, training trainee teachers who have an hour allocated a week to them (some lucky staff have schools who still give them time for this role), mentoring vulnerable students, additional pastoral responsibilities, maths/english intervention rather than farming it out to support staff, in multiagency meetings with families, used as internal cover to avoid supply rates etc.

The reality is usually that the more marginal the subject the more likely they are to have a lower teaching commitment.
The reality is the more marginal the subject, the more subjects they probably teach out of specialism at ks3 to make up their hours so the school doesn't have to hire new staff. It means that in reality some ks3 students can not have a subject specialist for some subjects for the whole of ks3.
The argument has to be the school will remove the financial deficit quicker by looking at teacher reductions rather than TA reductions who have a 100% pupil contact time.
100% contact time vs teaching staff contact time is moot. They are different jobs. I've been support staff and am now a teacher and the bottom line is that it's the teachers who teach the lessons and are accountable for progress and if schools lose good teaching staff then it won't matter a jot if you have a whole army of TAs as they're not qualified subject specialists trained to deliver ks3-4.

Schools are already hiring NQTs over experienced staff. They're already using work based ITT routes and hiring unqualified staff in places because it's cheaper than hiring a qualified teacher. I've seen jobs for PE teachers being advertised as instructors so they can be paid less and without burgundy book conditions. Experienced staff are being pushed out in some schools and bullied through capability before leaving after a period of sick leave. Jobs which once had TLR points no longer have TLR points as they become little projects to give to 3rd year teachers as it's 'good experience' and if you have 3 3rd year teachers you've saved a TLR. Key Stage coordinators in some departments are going so heads of large departments are doing more (hence the lighter timetable that some like to complain about). Some schools are already shifting GCSE intervention onto support staff who lack the subject knowledge to do it well because it costs less than having an 'overstaffed' core department (and usually end up wondering why the intervention has minimal impact).

I've been through restructuring as support staff and teaching staff and the idea of drawing battle lines based on chips on shoulders isn't conducive to getting anything sorted. I would be very, very wary of going in telling people what to cut based on the idea of 'but we have 100% contact time' when 100% contact time is a totally different job.

And we are clearly never going to agree but my experience in resolving financial issues in schools is that the first place schools look for savings is in non-teaching staff when actually the easiest place to be looking for savings in secondary schools is often in teaching staff.
The OP needs to handle any discussion with care but if they do and say nothing then they will bear the brunt of any cost saving initiatives.

admission
I'm not doubting savings can be made on teaching staff. What I'm pointing out is a number of measures most schools are already doing to reduce the cost of teaching staff (and some of that includes bullying out experience staff so they resign). Schools are already not replacing teaching staff who leave and rejigging timetables to have people teaching out of specialism etc so going in with a view of 'actually you should be looking at teaching staff and not support staff' is quite an antagonistic position.

Schools are not going to take the view it's fine to have GCSEs in core subjects staffed by non-specialists to satisfy a non-teaching staff regarding potential redundancies. It's bad enough having extensive non-specialist teaching at key stage 3 because by y10 you can tend to tell which students have had 3 years with a specialist vs 3 years with a mix of cover staff and non specialists.
It's a lot more complex than 'but we have 100% contact time'. Yes, that's true, but it's a totally different job.

Wow - a lot of vitriol addressed at the governors?

To be clear, the operational management should come from the school itself (headteacher and SLT) - the governors need to ensure the budget is balanced and that the school's expenditure is not exceeding its means.

The governors should not be taking decisions about redundancies - these should be taken by the SLT itself (presumably in conjunction with the LA) and ratified by the Board.

I'm speaking as a Governor and an FD.

I don't believe that converting to an Academy at this stage would prevent the redundancies I'm afraid. If the process is already under way then it's too late. The key thing for you as individuals is to ensure you take advise from your Union and that you make sure you understand the process and your rights as well as you can. Always take a witness into any meetings with you - the moral support and extra pair of ears is vital.

I wouldn't wait for redundancy if you can do something else, I'd ask for voluntary redundancy and get out now before lots of people start looking. It could be a golden opportunity.

I can't see how joining a MAT will save redundancies. We joined one a year ago and it has been an unmitigated disaster. Additionally teachers only get 12 month contracts.

Joining a MAT can save money as you don’t have to use standard teachers pay and conditions or employ support staff on LA contracts.

Our support staff cost us a bomb and earn very little - for every £1 we pay them it costs us an extra 70p in on costs. On top of that we have a generous LA sickness policy which is a massive pain to deal with - we can’t afford cover for teaching assistants who take liberties with illness. Support staff under a MAT will have poorer pensions and sick pay, and therefore are cheaper.

Additionally in a small school it’s better to have a handful of full time TAs rather than an army doing a few hours here and there. It’s not about what’s best for you, it’s about what’s best for the children of the school. And when budgets are as crap as they are, TAs are fairly low down the pecking order.

The reality is usually that the more marginal the subject the more likely they are to have a lower teaching commitment.
In my school (and I suspect the majority of schools nowadays), the reality is that those teachers will have their timetable filled with lessons that they are not specialists in. I teach a core subject and our entire KS3 is taught by non-specialists and/or unqualified teachers.

The teachers struggle, the kids struggle. This is the reality of budget cuts.

I disagree that it is the reality of budget cuts. If the school has a subject where they do not require a full time teacher then they should not be employing a full time teacher but say a 0.5FTE teacher. That would then allow the school to employ a 0.5FTE teacher in their specialist subject.
I accept that there will probably always be some teaching by non-specialist teachers but much tighter control of the level of employment would be more effective. Having said that it has no effect on funding but hopefully a positive effect on the teaching of the pupils.