Borders teachers caught up in administrative bungle
David Knox • Published 29 Aug 2011 09:30
0 Comments
Share this
TEACHERS across the region face paying back thousands of pounds - and many have yet to be officially told.
Just days after returning to the classrooms following the summer break, around 160 teachers from all over the Borders found their paypackets had been plundered by Scottish Borders Council's payroll department.
And they also learned that they will face a reduced salary for a further five months.
One furious teacher told the Border Telegraph: "This is causing a lot of grief for a lot of people. All we know is that there's been a payroll mix up and a lot of us have been getting too much holiday pay.
"To make it worse nobody from the council has even told us that we have to pay money back."
The bank-balance bombshell has hit teachers from all across the region - with many having up to £300 at a time taken from their monthly salaries.
The Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers introduced new terms for annual leave as part of plans to save £45 million.
But many unaware teachers in the Borders have continued to be paid for holidays they were not entitled to.
A retrospective exercise was launched by the local authority earlier this year to calculate who was entitled to what - and the results found 160 were overpaid and a further 140 had been underpaid.
Kay Miller from the EIS teaching union said: "We have been contacted by some of our members who are not happy with what has happened. You trust your employer to calculate your pay, although it is the employee's responsibility to check their wage slips. We have already negotiated for one teacher to pay back £100 per month rather than the five monthly payments of £300 that Scottish Borders Council wanted."
Scottish Borders Council did email headteachers at all of its nine secondary and 64 primary schools back in January and again in June with news of the changes and planned clawback. But the message wasn't passed on to many chalkface teachers.
A spokesman for the council's education department said: "Communication was issued to all schools in January and June, requesting that all teachers be advised that adjustments would have to be made to salaries, for those teachers who had started or varied their working hours. It appears that not all teachers were made aware of these adjustments. We continue to look at ways of improving how changes are communicated to teachers."
The backdated calculations have also seen 140 teachers being paid extra in their August wages.
Tracey Logan, director of resources at SBC, added: "We don't want to cause any hardship and we can negotiate repayments if it is required."
Return to the main index, get more from this section or browse our News archives.
