Pensions in private schools: TPS withdrawal

[Elthamjohn]

Has anyone gone through this? I am really worried that my school might be about to leave the TPS, and I just don’t know where to begin…

Would they offer an alternative? What have other schools done? How do you understand what a good deal is compared to the TPS?

Although industrial action has worked in many, many settings. They might back down!

Finding a job outside teaching with a defined benefit pension scheme is likely to be practically impossible unless you join the civil service.

Lots of jobs once had a defined benefit pension as standard. Times change.

@TizerorFizz was making the point that teachers might be glad to just have a job (without the pension).

My point was that plenty have left the profession. The DB scheme is a major incentive to join / stay @LittleBearPad

And teachers are enrolled in the TPS. That hasn’t changed at all in the maintained sector.

I’m not sure all teachers can find alternative employment with the same benefits. If the pension benefit doesn’t matter, as is demonstrated by teachers leaving, then why strike? It’s not very important it appears. It’s certainly easier to teach in many private schools so I don’t think that many will transfer to state. It’s been the case for a while that private schools don’t offer the same pensions but do offer better working conditions in other ways.

Maybe staff feel that having a job today is more important than having a decent pension tomorrow @TizerorFizz ?

It's important that parents know what's happening, and without the threat of industrial action schools aren't going to tell them. Then we can engage in debate - it may be that parents are prepared to pay an additional £250 pa to cover the increase, it may be that they aren't. But we'd all know where we stand.

What a load of crap.

I was a teacher for 25 years. What benefits? Please tell me. A 90 hour week and broken mental health and knackered knees were the only ‘benefits’ l had.

The pension was the only thing worth working for. 50000 teachers have left teaching this year. Must be some pretty good benefits eh?

The huge benefit has been the gold plated pension. I know lots of teachers who lived their jobs. Shame you didn’t. Don’t know a single one who worked 90 hours a week!! Did you have issues with time management? That’s 13 hours a day for 7 days a week! Who actually does that? Not even the wonderful heads I have known.

567,309 fte teachers in schools. So obviously more actual people. Clearly there are retirements. And people just don’t like the job they trained for. Fairly normal. Other people do not get the pensions teachers got and do a hard job too.

Really important that parents realise that the increase to fees to cover pension costs is minimal. @Sewingmachine1 For us, it would be about £30 a month.

…. and that parents start asking exactly what their fees are being spent on (if it is not teacher salaries). And are schools spending responsibly?

Yeah, hugely popular job. Missing target for teaching by 50%

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/gillian-keegans-teacher-apprenticeships-elephant-in-the-room-2888877

Does anybody have any experience of ‘fire / rehire’ on here? We don’t think that it is happening to us, but are the schools who use it listed in the public domain?

Did GDST not threaten it? We are currently under an HR1 but have been told that our jobs are not at risk.

Fire and rehire tends to be threatened more than it is used. An employer who actually does this would open themselves up to claims for unfair dismissal.

Unfortunately, though morally an unpleasant thing to do it wouldn’t be unfair dismissal if the employer can prove they are being reasonable.
Just been through it at my school and we looked into it all.

@Tizerorfizz so true!

Independent schools are notorious for lacking transparency around pay scales.

But the maintained sector have a standard published scale, so the word ‘competitive’, in the context of a TES advert, implies that pay would be competitive with the maintained sector.

If pay isn’t ‘competitive’ then why include that it is in your advert?

I am so sorry @OrangeSofa1 . Did it result in dismissals?

@OrangeSofa1 sorry to hear that. How did the employer define/prove 'reasonable'?

The union advice was that they could reasonably claim they couldn’t afford tps. Their alternative was also reasonable. Without union support, everyone pretty much gave up.
Our school owns half the town, shame cash flow was so poor they couldn’t afford to honour the teachers’ contracts.

Thanks @OrangeSofa1. We're in a totally different situation so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Did you have a rep in your school @OrangeSofa1 ?

Disgraceful that the school couldn’t honour teachers’ contracts.

@Elthamjohn yes, lots of union support. We had strike action etc. The school just didn’t budge.

@OrangeSofa1 at what point did the union officials withdraw support? If you had strike action, I'm assuming you had union support at that point? What changed if the school didn't budge?

The unions didn’t withdraw their support, they simply said in their opinion we would not win and there wouldn’t be any case to answer for unfair dismissal. This was after an 18 month battle. People were ground down and had enough by that point.
I think if the unions had coordinated all independent schools going through this at the same time it might have had more impact, more press etc.

There was a worry about being dismissed being on our work records too when applying for new jobs.