The Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers

The issue

The Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers (SNCT) is a tripartite organisation comprising the Scottish Executive (the devolved government for Scotland), Scottish Local Authorities and Teachers Organisations. As one of a series of initiatives to establish "A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century" it was agreed that 14,000 headteachers and teachers with management responsibilities should be subject to a job sizing exercise. This exercise would decide the salaries that should relate to each of the jobs.

Due to the complexity of this task and the demanding timescales the SNCT decided to appoint external consultants to advise on how this should be done.

Our approach

PricewaterhouseCoopers Human Resource Services was appointed to work with the SNCT to design and implement a "job sizing toolkit". The main challenges of the project were in reconciling the differing views and interests of the SNCT members, and in finding an acceptable approach that was both robust and sufficiently adaptable to meet the needs of education in Scotland in the future. We overcame these challenges by adopting a collaborative consulting style, ensuring that issues were dealt with openly and enabling differences to be understood and resolved.

The toolkit was tested in 10 local authorities prior to being implemented throughout Scotland and we carried out a formal consultation processes with 32 local authorities. Through one-day workshops, held over a period of five weeks, we trained over 220 people on the job sizing rules we had developed, and on the process for implementation. Following this we assisted with further negotiations in the SNCT on the quantitative aspects of the toolkit, advising on the impact on teachers' salaries and the cost implications. At the conclusion of these negotiations the toolkit was formally agreed by the SNCT.

Information on each of the 14,000 jobs was provided by each post holder through a formal questionnaire. We put in place quality control procedures to manage this data gathering process and provided telephone and e-mail enquiry facilities. On completion of the questionnaires we processed the data, merging questionnaires with school wide data provided by the local authorities to calculate each job size and to enable details of the new salaries to be issued to each post holder.

The outcome

The job sizing toolkit has now been fully implemented throughout Scotland. The results of our work have been:

• a fairer pay system that recognises differences between "larger" and "smaller" jobs
• better levels of pay for teachers with management responsibilities in primary schools
• a more flexible system for determining salaries, enabling schools and local authorities to introduce management structures that are better aligned to local needs
• a software tool to enable the size of jobs to be easily calculated going forward.

All of this was achieved within a timescale of fourteen months from when we were first appointed to the time when post holders were advised of their revised salaries.

For further information about this case study, please contact Daniel Hibbert by email or on +44 (0) 20 7804 3317