Education Bill

My Lords, Clause 18 abolishes the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, which was set up to design a national framework of pay and conditions for support staff in maintained schools in England. Its remit was to do so by combining, "““national consistency and local flexibility””," to avoid a rigid pay structure that was not applicable to the needs of all schools. As I reported in Grand Committee, the SSSNB has played a crucial role in preparing core documents setting out the range of non-teaching roles carried out in schools. This is an important personnel resource for employers. As we know, school support staff cover a wide range of functions and include teaching assistants, welfare support staff, specialist or technical staff and, for example, business management staff. As colleagues from the Benches opposite acknowledged in Grand Committee, in abolishing the SSSNB now the Government are scrapping it before it has had time to deliver the job profiles that it was set up to produce and that would, in due course, reduce the bureaucratic load on schools as well as set the scene for fair employment practices and protect employers from equal value claims. The abolition of the SSSNB is counter to the widespread support that it had from teachers, heads, governors and parents. Most employers welcomed the work being done. Many regarded it as long overdue, particularly as the job descriptions would have been recommendations and not prescriptions, and would therefore not have hindered schools or given rise to an unduly heavy administrative burden. Indeed, only last week, I received an e-mail from the Association of School and College Leaders urging me to put down an amendment to allow the SSSNB to stay. In Grand Committee the Minister argued that to implement the scheme would have been too time-consuming for school leaders, who would have to re-evaluate their staff. On the contrary, having profiles that self-governing schools could use as benchmarks could cut the time and costs that they would otherwise have to spend creating their own job descriptions. They would be a tool for schools to use rather than a mandatory, new employment structure. School support staff are an increasingly central feature of the education team in schools. They impact directly and indirectly on the success and achievement of schools. However, the abolition of the SSSNB is a clear signal from the Government that they do not value the contribution or status of support staff. It also sends a signal to the largely female staff carrying out these roles that they are somehow expendable and that it is okay for the gap in pay between teaching and non-teaching staff working side by side to widen while the differing levels of responsibilities narrow. As we mentioned in Grand Committee, Ofsted argued for such an initiative. It recommended that the Government should, "““provide guidance on appropriate levels of pay and conditions for the increasingly diverse roles that have been introduced as a result of workforce reform””." The work of the SSSNB is half complete. If we are concerned about value for money, what is the point of abandoning the project half way through? We are close to having a resource that employers would find useful and that would at last go some way to recognising the crucial role that support staff increasingly play in educational achievement. I hope that noble Lords will see the sense in the SSSNB completing the work in hand and will support the amendment.