Note – Editor’s text corrections made 18/01/2018

Do All Schools Have to Publish Gender Pay Gap Reports?

The recent story of a senior BBC employee resigning because of the inequality of her pay hit the headlines and seems to have reinforced the belief that the need to produce a report to show whether or not gender pay gap exists in an organisation is only relevant to higher paid employees.  That is a false view as the requirement applies to schools and many other organisations.

Collecting pay data for gender pay gap reporting

If a school employs 250 or more employees then the school is likely to be under a duty to collect and report on its pay data to meet the requirements of the Gender Pay Gap Reporting Regulations.

That applies to all forms of schools including:

• a)  Local Authority maintaned schools – the Governing Body is responsible for collecting and publishing the required data;
• b)  Pupil Referral Units – the LA is responsible for collecting and publishing the data;
• c)  Academies and Free schools are within the scope of the regulations and the proprietor is required to collect and publish the data
• d)  Independent and private schools have to follow the private sector gender pay reporting regulations – the legal employer is responsible.

For schools, 31st March of each year is the reference date on which the data is based.  Publication of the ‘analysed’ data must occur within one year of that date.   For schools in d) above the reference date is 5th April of each year.

First Mandatory Publication Date is in 2018

The first publication date falls in this year so you need to review how prepared you are to produce the required data to publish your school’s report.

The 2018 deadline for publication of your school’s report is 30 March 2018 (which also applies to the majority of public sector organisations) and 4 April 2018  for other organisations.

Remember that Independent and private schools are obliged to publish their report by 4th April 2018.

The Peculiar Situation of a School

Calculating remuneration for the purposes of the regulations is not straight forward for most organisations as specific definitions have to be used when data is calculated.   Schools are likely to encounter some issues with the following types of employees and their contracted hours:

• Term time only employees such as catering staff;
• Teaching staff subject to minimum contracted annual hours e.g. required to work a minimum of 1,265 hours over 39 weeks as per the full time hours in the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document;
• Head Teachers on an unspecified hours contract i.e. they are required to manage their own working time to fulfil their professional duties.

The task has been made easier by the giving of specific examples for the situations above.  Those examples and the principles can be seen on pages 30 and 31 of the revised booklet produced by ACAS, ‘Managing gender pay reporting’.

Diversity/Equality Reports are Different to Gender Pay Gap Reporting

Do not fall into the mistake of thinking that any diversity or equality data that you have published will suffice.  Such data will not meet the definitions required under the regulations for gender pay gap reports.

Help if Puzzled or Stuck

Where can you go to understand the requirements or seek an answer to a query?
The ACAS booklet is a reasonable source of reference and the related publications of ACAS.  Your HR adviser should also be able to advise you.

If you have a query on the requirements and/or publishing your report, please note that for a short while we shall accept queries, without a charge, if they take a short time to answer.  We will advise you, in advance, if the query will  take too long for this service. Please leave a message about your query by using the ‘chat’ pop up button which will appear on the bottom right hand side of this page.

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