Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

School secretaries and caretakers, as we have all agreed in this House, are very valued members of our school communities. I am fully aware of the vitally important role played by them in the running of our schools. I fully support, as does everyone, this important agreement which will improve their terms and conditions, and rightly so. The majority of primary and post-primary schools receive assistance to provide for secretarial services under grant schemes. Where a school employs a staff member to support those functions, that staff member is an employee of the school and responsibility for terms of employment rests with the school.

Fórsa tabled a claim in 2019 seeking parity of these staff with education and training board, ETB, public service staff. Extensive engagement has taken place since then between the Department, school management bodies and Fórsa to work towards a resolution, with the support of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. On 24 February this year, following a series of engagements at the WRC, a suite of measures designed to improve the working conditions of school secretaries was proposed, which Fórsa agreed to recommend to its members. As the Deputy indicated, a ballot was undertaken, the result of which was 95% agreement in favour of the deal.  I was very pleased with this overwhelmingly positive result on this long-running issue, the resolution of which has been a priority for me since my appointment.

The work to implement this agreement has now commenced in conjunction with Fórsa. It requires a complex process of assimilating information to capture accurate data in respect of each individual secretary. Additional resources are in place to provide capacity to manage this process to ensure both individual and school data are captured and correctly applied. This will also require the development of an IT system to collect the data and action the payroll obligations.  As this work is currently ongoing, it is not possible to commit to an exact timeline, but the Department has expedited the process and will communicate further as the work progresses.

The Department has issued a circular to schools to outline how the agreement will be implemented. The circular outlines that as a first phase of implementation of the agreement, schools must, before the end of September, calculate the initial assimilation rate of pay and annual leave entitlement for secretaries and offer it to them. Should the secretary choose to move to the new terms, the new pay rate should be applied by the school from 1 September 2022. The verification of this first phase, the calculation of back pay and the option to have the value of jobseeker's benefit included in pay will be addressed in the second phase of the assimilation process.

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