Susan Moore decided she’d had enough of being treated as a profit-generating commodity - especially when the school where she was doing supply work offered her a permanent job and the agency that had placed her there demanded a pound;1,500 fee.

In the end Mrs Moore, who couldn’t see why the school should have to pay such a transfer fee, decided not to take up the post. Instead, she set up the Supply Teacher Consortium, an agency - or “service”, as she prefers to call it - that shares profits with supply teachers, pays them according to the national scale and does not charge schools transfer fees.

Such fees often amount to much more than pound;1,500 and can thus make life very difficult for teachers who want to switch from supply to permanent work. Newly qualified teachers are hit particularly hard, says Mrs Moore. “Many NQTs are not aware of these transfer fees, and trap themselves in a cycle of working in lots of different schools on supply and never being offered a job - because even though the schools would love to employ them, they can’t afford the fee,” she explains. “That means that every school they work in is one less school that’s going to offer them a job,” she says.

Not all teacher supply agencies charge transfer fees, but those that do will find it much harder to get away with this practice once new rules on hiring temporary workers come into force. The rules have already been redrafted several times, but if they go through in their present form, employers will no longer have to pay transfer fees as long as they leave a gap of eight weeks after the end of the temporary assignment before taking workers on to their full-time staff.

The new rules would therefore see an end to financial barriers in the way of agency teachers who want to take a full-time job. For example, an agency supply teacher would be able to take up a full-time job in, say, September as long as they hadn’t done any work at the same school since the previous half-term break.

The Employment Agencies Regulations are among a raft of new developments which, taken together, promise to give supply teachers and other temporary workers a better deal. The Government is looking at the effects of extending employment rights such as maternity leave and redundancy pay to temporary workers. In addition, consultations have just ended over a proposed European directive that will give agency workers the right to the same basic employment conditions as permanent employees doing similar work. These would cover pay, maternity rights and protection against discrimination on grounds of sex, race, disabilities and age.

But the directive would not cover agency workers hired to work on assignments lasting less than six weeks. So teachers working supply for just a few days or weeks at a time would not benefit. It is also possible that pay will be excluded when the draft directive eventually becomes law - at least, that is what the Government, backed by much of the recruitment industry, wants to happen. But even if the law does end up saying that agency workers must be paid the same as similar permanent employees, it remains unclear what “similar” really means in the case of supply teachers.

Bob Wicks, chief executive of Select Education and chair of the education division of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, argues that it makes no sense to compare supply teachers with those in permanent jobs.

“If you are doing one day, two days or one week in a school, you can’t have the same level of involvement as someone who does the job permanently,” he says.

But other recruitment insiders take a different view. Mike Norman, managing director of Reed Education Professionals, says that while supply teachers may do less administrative work than permanent staff, for both groups the job is about teaching children in the classroom, so agency staff should be paid on the same scale as permanent teachers. “With something as fundamental as pay and where there is a pre-defined scale, I can’t see how somebody would justify not using it,” says Mr Norman.

The argument over how much protection the new directive should give agency workers is likely to continue for a long time. Meanwhile, those on fixed-term contracts, another group of workers who have traditionally been hard done by, are already enjoying new employment rights. Under regulations introduced in October, they now have the right to the same pay, pensions, holidays, sick pay and training opportunities as permanent employees.

These regulations also state that if someone is employed on a string of fixed-term contracts for four years or more, they will automatically become permanent members of staff unless there is a good reason why this should not happen. But some of the unions representing fixed-term employees say the new regulations don’t go far enough. For example NASUWT, the second biggest teachers’ union, wants teachers to be entitled to a permanent job after just two or three years on fixed-term contracts.

But Joe Boone, the union’s assistant secretary for industrial relations, is ready to concede that permanent status after four years is better than nothing.

“These regulations won’t have a major impact,” he says. “But there is obviously now an acceptance in government that there is a genuine need to remove the misuse of fixed-term contracts.”