NEU’s recommended redundancy policy
Selection for redundancy will be based on objective, precisely defined and justifiable criteria, which are capable of being applied in an independent way to ensure that employees are fairly selected.
Criteria relating to attendance/health, conduct or capability should not be used, as other procedures exist for addressing these issues.
NEU recommends that the criteria adopted in a particular situation should be chosen in light of the school’s curricular and organisational needs. These criteria should be:
- established after consultation with the recognised trade unions, or staff group where there is no recognised union.
- explicit and published to staff as a whole.
- objective, fair and precisely defined.
- non-discriminatory (whether directly or indirectly) on grounds of gender, marital status, race, national or ethnic origins, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation, or trade union activity – in accordance with the school’s development plan to ensure that curriculum and organisational needs are maintained.
- based upon the outcomes of an audit of staff skills.
- designed to avoid either constituting a judgement on the employee’s professional capability or prejudicing the employee’s future employment prospects.
Employees should be invited to complete a ‘skills audit’ to provide the necessary information or to verify relevant persona data held by the school.
The data sought by any skills audit should be limited to that which is necessary to apply the criteria.
The NEU model redundancy procedure is one which NEU believes all independent school employers should be able to feel comfortable with, and which is fair to both employee and employer. Many schools already have a redundancy procedure which is more generous than suggested here.
