Single status pay and benefits review - information for school support staff

What is single status?
In 1997 the national agreement between local authority employers and trade unions required local authorities to look at all the different types of terms and conditions of employment within their organisation and ‘harmonise’ them – things like pay, annual leave entitlement and allowances. The ultimate goal was to ensure all administrative, professional, technical and clerical staff, and manual employees shared the same ‘single status’ of employment – a set of common, fair and equal terms and conditions that applied to all workers within the organisation. (This national agreement does not apply to groups of employees who have a separate national negotiating body to represent them such as teachers and fire fighters).

In 2004 local authorities agreed to the implementation of single status by April 2007. To achieve this, Cumbria County Council began a comprehensive job evaluation exercise – a key part of single status – which involved analysing jobs within the council to develop a more equitable pay and reward structure.
 
In order to migrate individual job evaluations into a modern and equitable council-wide pay structure a job families approach was introduced to group similar jobs into occupational 'families'. The overall aim is to achieve a modern and equitable pay and reward system, to prevent any potential future pay inequality, implemented from 30 September 2011.