Over 1000 Sheffield school staff are set to receive cash settlements in response to long standing gender based pay inequality.

The Sheffield Role Review Programme has found that around 260 job roles had experienced unfair pay and recognises that mainly female workers were being underpaid compared to their male counterparts.                                               

Sheffield council have worked alongside trade unions Unison, GMB and Unite over two years to reach a conclusion.

The people offered payment excludes teachers and focuses on roles such as teaching assistants and front office staff, who have been offered a pay package as well as top ups to their pension funds.            

The amount the council has agreed to pay out is approximately £36 million, which is expected to be paid out to the recipients over summer.

George Ayre, a regional organiser for Unison said: “This will affect a significant number of low-paid support staff at 37 community schools

“it’s the result of a lengthy negotiation process to help workers who’ve experienced pay inequality.”                                                                                                                       

This decision has been reached by Sheffield city council alongside trade unions after concerns were raised in 2023 over their then current job evaluation scheme, the GLPC.

UK councils widely use the Greater London Provisional Council (GLPC) scheme to assess pay gaps, however GMB, one of the three trade unions working with the new programme raised an issue with the way the GLPC was implemented in Sheffield.

This led to the Sheffield Role Review Programme being introduced in 2024.

People thought to be affected had to fill out a Pre Evaluation Questionnaire about their job title, role and working conditions.

A trained job analyst then analysed these to compare and look for any anomalies within job roles.

This told them whether staff in similar roles and performing similar tasks were getting different pay, leading to a decision on who is eligible for the offer.

Sheffield now operates on the Joint Negotiating Committee scheme, as it is trying to ensure all future discrepancies are transparent and sustainable trying to eliminate the need for future investigations into unequal pay. The programme originally set out to evaluate over 2000 job roles with 3500 people to be evaluated. Out of these metrics only approximately 1000 staff have received offers, meaning the rest have not been deemed as having experienced unequal pay.