Kia ora koutou
- Collective agreement changes
- Updates in payroll following pay equity settlements
- Salary assessment and ACC processing update
- Dedicated payroll advisors for schools
- Schools Business Managers' conference
Collective agreement changes
Education Payroll will be applying the collective agreement changes for support staff in pay period 10. This will be available to view on the SUE report on 5 August 2022 (and available to view in EdPay from 29 July). The switch to the new rates will occur automatically for staff who are already on a Collective Agreement (Support Staff CA).
Important: We ask that you do not send in any pay change detail requests for these new hourly rates until pay period 11, except for admins who are not to be touched until the pay equity claim has been processed. For now, all you need to do is check your employee’s status and designation is correct (see Updates in payroll following pay equity settlements advice below).
Support staff on an Individual Employment Agreements
If your support staff member has signed a new Individual Employment Agreement (Support Staff IEA), you can complete a NOVO22nt advising us of their sign-up date, and we will begin to process these after pay period 10. Pay rates will be backdated to the date they signed.
For this IEA update, you can advise changes for annualised staff on either a Novo22nt (NOVO22nt) or EdPay24nt.
Support staff moving to a new IEA may not receive their pay changes at the same time as staff on collective agreements. We will process IEA changes as soon as we can. You will see on EdPay and in the SUE report when the changes have been made.
Important: Please do not send in any pay change detail requests for these new hourly rates until after your employee has signed their new IEA, except admins who are not to be touched until the pay equity claim has been processed. The switch to the new rates will occur automatically when we load them onto the new IEA. Pay change requests for other reasons eg annual progression can still be submitted.
Updates in payroll following pay equity settlements
On 4 July 2022, the Ministry of Education and NZEI Te Riu Roa settled the Administration support staff in schools pay equity claim and the Kaiārahi i te Reo pay equity claim. Pay equity changes will be implemented later this year. Changes to the new pay rates will happen automatically. Please do not attempt to move existing Administration staff / Kaiārahi i te Reo into the new grades or send in any pay change requests. We will be providing advice and guidance on what you need to do for pay equity from August.
To make sure that your employees receive the correct rates once both settlements are effective, all that principals and authorised payroll users need to do is check your employees' status and designation codes are correct.
Action 1: Employment status in EdPay
Make sure all affected employees’ employment status is correct in EdPay.
Action 2: Designation codes
For employees to receive payment following the settlement, they must be on the correct payroll designation code in EdPay. Note: These designations need to be correct from 20 August 2021.
To check the current codes, view your My Employees tab in EdPay. See the employee’s job history tab for their historical codes. If an employee is performing multiple different and separate roles, they should have separate designation codes and job numbers for each role. See an example of an employee on separate designation codes on education.govt.nz. Designation codes can be changed on EdPay, or a NOVO2nt form. If you have questions about whether an employee is on the correct designation code eg should they use school secretaries or secretarial typing, these need to be directed to the NZ School Trustees Association (NZSTA) because this is HR related and Education Payroll can not advise.
Salary assessment and ACC processing update
Thank you for your patience while we processed the backlog of salary assessment applications. We are now back to processing complete applications within the 15 working days. We know that it has been a frustrating situation for people applying for salary assessments since March when the backlog started building up and we are sorry for this. The backlog was caused by a sharp rise in applications, staff shortages due to sickness and losing a number of skilled and experienced staff at the end of last year. All of this meant we had less capacity to process salary assessments. Our new staff are getting up to speed processing applications and we have recently hired additional staff. We’re now focused on improving our processes. Only one-quarter of submitted applications have all of the information required to process the salary assessment when it’s first received, and so we are working on improving this wherever we can.
ACC claims have also been taking longer than usual to process. We are continuing to make progress on outstanding claims, but the team has reduced capacity due to sickness. Thank you for your continued patience.
Dedicated payroll advisors for schools
We want to acknowledge the feedback we’ve had from schools that want their own dedicated payroll advisor. We want to provide this too, and we are working hard to attract, recruit and train more payroll advisors. Once they are on board, it takes a new payroll advisor up to 14 weeks of training before they are ready to support schools on the phone, so we ask for your patience while we find and train new staff.
Schools Business Managers’ conference
It was great to be able to meet some business managers face-to-face at their conference during the school holidays. At the conference we talked about the new EdPay features available now and what is coming up. We heard about the features schools miss from Novopay Online, and what they enjoy about our service and where we need to do better. Thank you to the attendees who gave us a lot to take away to help make EdPay better and easier to use. Next month we might see some you at the Lower North Island School Administrators’ conference.
Ngā mihi
Education Payroll team