Fri, 1 Jul 2011

Academies provoke jobs shift in payroll to private suppliers

The payroll sector could witness a shift in job concentration from local authorities towards private suppliers as schools convert to academies, a payroll provider has claimed.

Bishop Fleming, a payroll provider, said it had seen a rise in the number of academies seeking to become clients. With appointments to 50 academies so far, of which 12 opted for payroll services, it said academies could afford to choose private payroll if unsatisfied with local authority services.

Lee Hellingsworth, business development manager in payroll services at Bishop Fleming, said: ‘If schools think their payroll is good, then most schools of that authority won’t be of a mind to switch. If schools think it’s not quite so good they might look further afield.’

Figures published in June by the Department for Education showed more than 1,200 schools have applied to become academies since the option was announced last year. With almost 25,000 schools in England, the potential for change is huge.

But Anne Gibson, head of HR & organisational development at Norfolk County Council and president of the Public Sector People Manager’s Association, disagreed that academies would choose private provision.

‘If academies aren’t happy with the service they’re already getting, they could use that opportunity to switch, but they can do that anyway,’ she said. ‘Just because schools aren’t academies doesn’t mean they’re tied into local authority for things like payroll.’ She said job losses in local authority payroll departments were unlikely: ‘Not because of academies – it would have happened already.’

Hellingsworth said if there was a shift it would not lead to loses in the sector overall. ‘If there’s less payroll work in local authorities there’ll be more payroll work in the private sector,’ he said.