strange redundancy process? Is this legal?

[Bronte]

Employers: independent school
Situation: told 2 full time redundancies needed to be made.
Only 1 redundancy made. Everyone else received letter saying that they had been through the skills criteria matrix and had not been selected for redundancy.
After receiving this letter we were told that
school still needs to make savings so asked the part time staff to consider reducing their hours, amounting to a £5000 pay cut.
Same staff given the choice between reduced hours or one of them is going to be made redundant. None of them ready to agree to either scenario.
Union advice being sought.
Any other professional opinions valued please.
Thank you.

Yes legal.

Well if they need to save x amount of money on the face of it all staff should have been asked to make that decision, not just part time staff, unless it's in a particular area of work where the staff just happen to all be part time.

Is that what your concern is - the fact that full timers haven't been asked to consider reducing hours?

Sorry what Ribena said - hit reply button too fast, assuming they've already gone through the full timers and decided not to bin any of them then wouldn't (or couldn't) make sense to ask them again.

Erm. Flowery even. I'll get there in the end.

no, the full timers were not approached. The process we thought had all been gone through because we all received the letter confirming our positions.

From what you've said, this sounds dodgy. It is good practice to think about alternatives to redundancies, such as reduced hours. However, that shouldn't be something that only affects part timers. I would suggest that the part time staff ask why only they were approached with this request.

However, the caveat that I would give is the same one Flowery mentioned. If it is a particular area of work that is being targeted with the request it might be ok. For example, if all the teaching assistants were part time, and it was teaching assistants who had been asked to think about reducing their hours, then that is potentially ok. It would be legitimate for the school to focus their cuts on a particular area (so not affecting teachers, other support staff, etc)

Thank you for the feedback. We all work in ks1 where we will lose 2 classes by merging groups. So yes I can see why we have been targeted. What I find strange is why they didn't make a second redundancy along with the first one. Their problem is not giving us enough notice as we have a terms notice written in our contracts, This would mean they have to pay us until xmas as well as stat redundancy. They are so strapped for cash that they want to avoid this. They don't seem to have any alternative though as we refuse to drop our hours.