Term Time Pay over 12 months - but what do you pay when someone leaves? - General - HR in Schools and Academies

2 Term Time Pay over 12 months - but what do you pay when someone leaves?

Nina | 0 Posts

9 Jan, 2024 15:37

For term time pay we pay as you would expect, average hours we pay 12 equal payments. However what should you do when someone leaves. We pay NMW and do not want to under pay or over pay. An example would be if someone leaves half way through a term, and example would be they do 30 hours a week and the term working weeks are 36 = total hours worked 1080 x £10.42 = £11253.6 /12 = £937.80.

If they leave mid way through a term, they may have worked not enough hours (not so worried about) as overpaid and employee gets a bit extra.

If they have worked more hours than they have been paid, is we paid pro rata £937.20 then we would be underpaying them and that would not be great as we could be paying below NMW. I have been told that schools pay differently are are not worried about this underpayment?

I guess this question applies to joiners and changes in hours. Can we apply different pay rules to leavers? I think not.

Am I overthinking this, we have had a lot of discussions around this subject in house and have researched but coming up with many different approaches - any advice please.

Thank you

Nina

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Nina Waters | 0 Posts

9 Jan, 2024 17:02

I think the approach on this will be different if you're paying at/close to NMW, or not.
Most TTO staff will leave at the end of a term, and I would then pay them until the start of the new term - so they get paid for the larger holidays that fall at Christmas, Easter and the summer. If they are canny, they do the full academic year, as the impact of losing/being paid for the summer months is obviously greater.
I agree that there is the risk of underpaying them their hours, so if you're close to NMW in particular, I'd do the calculation when they leave and make good if needed.
Equally, in nearly 7 years working in schools, I've never had anyone query this! Sometimes we tie ourselves in knots trying to be fair, for all the right reasons - but as long as the process feels fair/ balanced, most staff will understand the approach.
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Kimberly | 0 Posts

10 Jan, 2024 09:17

We say TTO staff "bank" pay for August, thus, if they leave before the end of the year we calculate if we owe them any money based on the days worked vs what we have paid. We call this banked pay on their final payslip.

However, if when they started it was mid-year, technically they would not have banked enough pay for the whole month's pay for August, so you should deduct any overpayment from their banked pay.

In recent years staff have started wising up to this and a local school-based HR consultancy started advising on this a few years ago.
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