Pretending every trust is the same won't solve pay concerns

It was welcome to see the education secretary writing in Tes that the School Support Staff Negotiating Body (SSSNB) “is not about imposing a one-size fits all solution”.

But time will tell whether this government - and any future one- truly understands the importance of that commitment.

Support staff deserve fair pay, good conditions and a strong voice. Nobody should object to that.

But the government will have to ensure that the establishment of a central bureaucratic body does not restrain positive innovation and necessary flexibility.

A negotiating body for support staff

Governments have a recurring instinct when faced with complexity.

Difference looks untidy. Untidiness starts to look unfair. Before long, the answer becomes another national framework - but fairness and uniformity are not the same thing.

Sometimes fairness requires consistency; sometimes it means allowing, even encouraging, difference.

School trusts understand this instinctively. They standardise where it improves quality - safeguarding, financial controls, professional development, curriculum resources - but they also know not everything should be standardised. Some decisions are better made closer to the people affected.

When it comes to the SSSNB, let’s take the decision to expand the definition of support staff to include centrally employed trust staff.

Trusts today are very different organisations from the individual schools around which the original SSSNB was designed.

Central teams now include finance directors, HR specialists, estates professionals, safeguarding experts, digital leaders, subject advisers and school improvement specialists.

These roles vary considerably depending on a trust’s size, geography, strategy and the needs of its schools, responding to the ask from successive governments to solve problems at scale.

And yet, while the system has changed, there are questions about whether the policy has changed sufficiently. Roles that differ fundamentally across trusts risk being treated as equivalent because the policy remains anchored to the idea that everyone works the same way.

Flexibility is vital

This is not an obscure technical concern. Flexibility is one of the reasons why trusts are effective.

The ability to shape central teams around local circumstances helps trusts to recruit specialist expertise, respond to local labour markets and organise services around pupils’ needs. With major reforms ahead, including on special educational needs and disabilities, the instinct to ossify structures when flexibility will be vital is worrying.

The secretary of state today referred to a teaching assistant supporting children with complex needs, saying someone was “doing the exact same [role] in another part of the country”.

Her own upcoming SEND reforms - with individual school inclusivity plans and local SEND groupings - could, rightly, see a wide range of big changes to such roles across different schools.

It is also concerning that limited weight was given to the views of school trusts; organisations made up of hundreds of thousands of support staff.

While the government says a majority of respondents to its consultation on the SSSNB supported its proposals, our sense is that there is concern among trusts about the proposal to include central support staff in its scope.

A Confederation of School Trusts survey of 254 trusts - many more than the number of trust responses to the DfE’s consultation - showed 93 per cent were concerned about bringing centrally employed trust staff within scope.

This was not because trust leaders oppose fair pay. Many are concerned that greater central prescription and bureaucracy would make it harder to recruit and retain specialist staff in local labour markets and to shape employment offers around the needs of their communities.

If anyone understands what it takes to recruit and retain support staff, it is the organisations that employ them.

The pay and funding situation

There is a deeper contradiction, too.

If the government genuinely wants to improve pay and conditions for support staff, it cannot separate that ambition from funding. Last week’s teacher pay settlement again requires schools to absorb part of the cost through efficiencies.

A system expected to find savings year after year will always struggle to improve pay and conditions, whatever the negotiating machinery becomes. Ministers still ultimately control the purse strings.

Today’s timetable is also challenging. The consultation response published today is from a consultation that closed a year ago.

The recruitment of the independent chair has not yet begun, nor is there a published constitution. 

A body intended to influence pay from April 2027 won’t exist for more than a few months before then, leaving an incredibly tight timeline for the first round of negotiations. The recognised unions have themselves warned that the compressed timetable risks further industrial tension.

The irony is that this debate comes as politicians increasingly champion devolution, local leadership and the importance of place. When working with a genuinely diverse and devolved school system, the government must resist the instinct to reach for central prescription.

Support staff deserve fairness. They deserve good pay and conditions. But they will not benefit from pretending that every trust is organised identically, every support role is equivalent or every workforce challenge has a single national answer. 

Government will need to honour the commitment made today by the secretary of state to avoid a “one size fits all” approach.

Steve Rollett is the deputy CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts