Many teachers in Suffolk have this month not received arrears of their threshold pay which should have been back-dated to September 2000. They would have expected a lump sum of over £1300 to be included in their pay packet this month. NUT County Secretary Martin Goold said that this "added insult to injury" for teachers who are already having to wait up to 9 months for the results of their applications on which they had spent so much time and effort back in June 2000.
Mr Goold blamed the Government for introducing what they had always been told was a counter-productive, bureaucratic and impractical scheme. "The problem is that, because not all teachers get the threshold payment, payroll cannot programme the computer to treat all teachers the same. Each threshold "pass" has to be entered individually onto the computer."
The NUT accepts that the County Council has previously kept pace with the amendments but the Council says that it could not cope with the large number of threshold payments on top of the normal end-of-year extra work, including adjusting all teachers’ pay for the April pay-rise as well Mr Goold said that the threshold idea started off as a fiasco and is continuing true to form. The cost of the whole administering the whole unfair process was escalating.
| Assessor training | £27.5m |
| Head’s training | £8.6m |
| Teacher INSET | £50m |
| Time spent on applications | £47.3m |
| Assessors’ visits | £15m |
Because of the delays and poor planning by Government, this years’ assessment and appeals would not be completed before next year’s applications are due. Some teachers will have retired before their they know the outcome of an application made in June 2000. The NUT says that the whole idea is wasteful and unfair. "Instead of such a divisive measure", said Mr Goold, "the Government should drop the threshold application "test" and simply pay all teachers the professional rate for the job."