Costs related to teacher strikes (FOI)

Request

I would like to know, in respect of all completed and proposed school strike days during the 2018 / 2019 academic year:

A

The aggregate amount that will not be paid by the States of Jersey to National Education Union teaching staff as a result of their participation in the completed and proposed strikes

B
The aggregate amount received by the States of Jersey from parents of fee paying schools in respect of those same days

Response

A

The total saving on salaries during the strike action in the academic year 2018 / 2019 was £312,697. This represents £296,868 on basic salaries and £15,829 on Social Security payments.

Members of the National Education Union were on strike for eight days in May. The total saving on their salaries was £247,191. This represents £234,684 on basic salaries and £12,507 on Social Security payments.

The amounts that represent each Union can only be shown for May 2019 as the salaries were previously deducted in the same months. It is estimated that to extract the NEU data from the previous strike would take in excess of 12.5 hours to compile as it would involve analysing each employee’s record. This further breakdown is therefore exempt under Article 16 (Cost excessive) and Article 25 (Personal information) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

B

In the case of fee-paying provided schools, fees are calculated and levied on a per term basis. The number of days on which a fee-paying provided school is open varies from term to term and may be affected by a number of factors (for example, industrial action, adverse weather conditions and inset days). The Education (Jersey) Law 1999 provides for the Governing Bodies of fee-paying provided schools to set fees (subject to the approval of the Minister) for the provision of education in each of those schools. Such schools also receive funding from the Government of Jersey. The combined fees and funding are used to cover the costs of running the school.

The fees charged by fee-paying provided schools in the Summer term in 2019 is shown in the table below.

Articles applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information

Article 25 Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

Internal Review Request

Thank you for your response above. Unfortunately you don't seem to have answered my request;  Request B asked for the aggregate amount of fees received by the Government of Jersey in respect of last term's strike days. You have simply given me the total fees payable per child per term, which I already know.

The answer to my question should be fairly simple to calculate, as follows:

[F/D] x S

where:

F = aggregate fees received by the Government in respect of schools affected by strikes in academic year 2018 / 2019

D = number of days in academic year 2018 / 2019

S = number of strike days in academic year 2018 / 2019

If you don't want to work that out, then confirmation of the amount equal to F (fees received) in the calculation above would be sufficient. I can then calculate the answer to my question using D = 189 (my own assessment of the number of days) and S = 10. Please do let me know if you disagree with these figures.

Internal Review Response

The total amount of income received by the Government Jersey between September 2018 and August 2019 in respect of fees was £11,222,241. The breakdown is shown in the table below.

 
The total number of days in the academic year 2018 / 2019 was 190 days. However, the running costs of a school are year-round (eg staffing, site maintenance costs and so on) and therefore the fees cannot be apportioned against the number of academic days. The fees contribute to the annual cost of running a school.

The strike action days along with a link to provide details of which schools were impacted is listed below.

14 January (11:30 – 14:00)

15 January

19 March

26 March

1 May

7 May

8 May

15 May

16 May

21 May

22 May

23 May