North Lanarkshire Update

I received the following email from a regular reader in North Lanarkshire over the weekend.

The proposals regarding Classroom Assistants look perfectly ridiculous to me and the 50% proposal seems like a 'softening up' tactic to make a 25% cut look more acceptable.

But either way it's quite shocking that some of the lowest paid, predominantly female, groups within the council workforce are under attack and bearing the brunt yet again.

As I said the other day, this is the same council that introduced a controversial performance bonus scheme for North Lanarkshire's chief officials which earned this already highly paid group an extra £2 million between 2002 and 2014.

Seems obvious to me that the leadership of the Council have dug a great big hole for themselves over the years and it's high time they cleared out some of the 'deadwood' at the top of the organisation.

And faced with the latest budget crisis I would have thought the employer and the trade unions would think again about how best to implement the latest local government pay agreement, in a concerted effort to preserve jobs.     


Hi Mark,

I am a classroom assistant in North Lanarkshire Council.

On Thursday our headteacher was called into a meeting in which they were briefed on the latest round budget savings proposals. They were then told to go and have meetings with staff before end of day. 

Teachers numbers protected she said due to directive from Scottish Government. We only got information on savings for learning and leisure so the most glaring entry on the proposal list was ref LLS 011a - reduce the number if Classroom Assistants by 50%, or proposal LLS 011b - reduce number of Classroom Assistants by 25%. 

There being two proposals the worry is that if one gets rejected they can just implement the other one. Feel this is a punitive measure by council against low paid female workers for fighting and in some cases winning our equal pay and regrading. 

The consultation period is over the whole of November and if the proposals go through, the education service in North Lanarkshire will be losing more jobs the Steel industry. 

Heads were told that council not recieving less money but the costs are higher so that's why we've got a deficit. They are a very wasteful council squandering money on unnecessary resources and paying huge performance related bonuses ...shameful . 

Please help us keep this high profile Mark and thank you 

M