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ACE cuts have surplus staffing implications |
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(PPTA News, July 2009, p. 9)
If the government is going to slash funding for school-based adult community education (ACE) classes – it should foot the bill for the thousands of redundancies this move could create.
PPTA ACE advocate Jane Benefield said cutting 80% of the $16million allocated to ACE courses would be a cruel blow to the communities they operate in, and could hit schools in the pocket.
The budget decision to allocate only 20% of ACE funding to a small number of providers could have a “quite significant” effect on the finances of individual schools across the country, she said.
“Schools will be calculating their surplus staffing costs in regard to terminating their ACE programmes and staff. They will be facing costs ranging from six weeks pay, if they have only recently appointed a new co-ordinator, through to a full teachers’ salary and two units for up to a year.”
Jane did not think it was fair for schools to meet the costs of a decision they had not been prepared for.
“We need to know with some urgency what the ministry intends to give schools to ensure that they are all treated equally,” she said.
PPTA has written to the Ministry of Education outlining these concerns and requesting clearer information, but at the time of printing there had been no response.
ACE collective agreement surplus staffing provisions are as follows.
- Permanent non-teacher co-ordinators – six weeks pay for one year and two weeks for additional years. There may be 70 or 80 of these – some may have been working for 20 years and others only appointed last year.
- Teaching co-ordinators – There are maybe 120 to 140 of these – they would most likely return to teaching but there would be some costs if they couldn’t.
- There are still a few schools where there were either ministerial or community learning centre appointments, where full time co-ordinators share employment terms and conditions of a teachers’ collective.
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