Part of 1. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 17 October 2017.
Schools come under the regulation of local authorities—the responsibility of local authorities at any rate—and, of course, the Welsh Government is responsible for funding those schools and has great persuasive authority, even if it doesn’t have the legal authority. Amongst other deficiencies of the current situation for lots of agency teachers is they’ve got no access to the teachers’ pension scheme and, often, their holiday pay arrangements mean that part of the wages that they’re paid for doing their job are held back to them, to be handed back during the holidays as though that were holiday pay on top of their normal pay, which is quite wrong. The effect has been that, for public sector workers in general, who have had a pay cap for the last 10 years, supply teachers have done a good deal worse and many of them have had a pay cut in effect of up to 40 per cent in the last 15 years. Also, many of these supply contracts have a clause in them, which you have to accept or else you don’t get the job, saying, ‘I accept that I will not be paid according to agency worker regulations.’ Is the Welsh Government going to do something specific about these abuses?