Mr. Andy Pike:

Fórsa welcomes the opportunity to address the committee on the status of non-teaching staff in our schools sector. The committee has already received our detailed submission on this subject which encompassed problems affecting school secretaries and caretakers, special needs assistants, staff in education centres and the school completion service.

The Fórsa Support Our Secretaries campaign is unusual. It is unusual because it is rare to find an issue raised by a trade union which has seemingly universal support among the public, parents, students, and colleagues, as well as across many political parties. The lack of public service status for the majority of school secretaries results in low pay, precarious insecure employment, lack of pension provision, lack of sick pay and no holiday pay. These problems can be resolved by transferring school secretaries and caretakers on to public service conditions of employment, as is the case for the 10% of such staff employed by education and training boards.

Any objective assessment of the employment status of school secretaries would result in the conclusion that as a group they have been taken for granted, undervalued and ignored both within the schools sector and the political world for far too long. Many of our members who have worked in schools all of their careers believe their work was never valued. They also believe that, especially in smaller schools, dealing with administration was viewed as something of a vocational obligation not meriting recognition or even fair employment rights. Such perspectives may have been commonplace 50 or 60 years ago. However, the employment model has not kept pace with the development of our education system and the increasingly complex demands placed on school secretaries who now carry significant levels of responsibility within our schools in areas including accounting, banking and audit queries.

It could never have been the intention of policy makers in 1994 to engineer a two-tier pay system where those employed by the then vocational education committees would remain and continue as public servants, with job security, pension rights and public service payscales, while the 90% of staff paid through the ancillary grant were left on locally determined conditions of service, required to sign on the dole in the summer months, as well as without access to occupational sick pay, pensions or job security.

Some progress has been made. In 2015 the union secured the first collective agreement covering pay for grant-funded secretaries and caretakers. That agreement expires at the end of this year. Fórsa has formally requested that the Department of Education and Skills agrees to meet to open pay negotiations on an agreement to come into effect once the current deal expires at the end of the year.

The Support Our Secretaries campaign is designed to highlight the injustices of the current employment model, as well as the value of the work carried out by our members. We have tried to convey the esteem in which secretaries are held by local communities, school colleagues, students and the tens of thousands of parents who trust implicitly the advice of the school secretary. As a parent, one call I always answer is the one from our school secretary.

Will the committee endorse this campaign to regularise the employment status of grant-funded school secretaries and caretakers? The cost and the ask from the employer is small, but the benefits of changing the unfair system will be felt in 90% of our schools.