TWENTY-EIGHT teachers have been awarded six weeks’ pay as compensation for Cornwall Council’s failure to provide them with information required by law when their school became an academy.
After Pool Business and Enterprise College became Pool Academy Trust on April 1, 2011, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) submitted an employment tribunal claim in respect of the council’s failure to inform and consult under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (Tupe), and sought compensation for affected members.
The panel agreed the council failed to give the union the requisite information regarding the transfer’s legal, social and economic implications, including the effect on teachers’ continuity of service, the fact that statutory protection of terms and conditions of employment would be removed and that terms and conditions of transferring teachers would no longer be, or would be only partly, determined by national or collective agreement.
The tribunal awarded six weeks’ gross pay to each affected NUT member.
