Some staff could see their annual earnings fall by up to almost £10,580 according to the GMB trade union, which has warned nursery staff could resort to taking industrial action.
Brighton and Hove City Council bosses want to restructure four council-run nurseries to save £140,000 a year, by downgrading workers' pay grades, reducing hours and introducing different shift patterns.
The four nurseries under review are Bright Start, Cherry Tree, Acorn and Roundabout, which was a Nursery of the Year category finalist in the 2014 Nursery World Awards.
Comments left by locals on a GMB petition opposing the proposals, among them some of the 60 nursery workers affected, reveal sharp concern about the future quality of care if the changes go ahead.
‘I am profoundly concerned at proposals to both reduce the pay of nursery staff and cut the hours of work, seriously undervaluing this crucial work and seriously threatening the consistency of care for some of the city's most vulnerable children,’ one former nursery head warned.
A nursery practitioner affected by the proposals said, ‘Staff will not be able to afford to stay and the turnover of staff will increase. I have previously worked in nurseries where staff turnover is high and the quality of care is different.
‘The children have less security and have to continuously cope with staff changes which can have an effect on their wellbeing.’
GMB Sussex branch secretary Mark Turner told Nursery World some staff would be hit ‘three-fold’ by the changes.
‘While some are having their pay reduced because they’re [the council] reducing their skill grade, you’re then reducing their hours so their earnings are being hit twice,’ he said.
‘The third way, and you’re really unfortunate if you’re hit by all three, is there are some people who will move to term time and not 52-week work.’
Mr Turner said the council planned to replace staff with apprentices. He agreed this would reduce care quality in settings, and particularly affect children in nurseries within deprived areas.
He warned that the local workforce could strike as a result of the local authority’s actions, which it plans to introduce from October 2016.
‘They are very angry,’ he said of the nursery staff. ‘The last time I saw this scale of anger in the area was in 2004 when we had a dispute against schools when they looked to cut support staff's working weeks and pay. That culminated in industrial action and ended up going to conciliation in Acas [the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service].’
Chair of Brighton and Hove City Council’s children, young people and skills committee, councillor Tom Bewick, said the restructure aimed to address inconsistencies in the way staff were graded and shift working was arranged.
‘In one of the nurseries most children attend term-time only so we need to ensure that the staffing of the nursery matches the times children attend,’ he said.
‘There will be no compulsory redundancies in this restructure, but we will need to change the terms and conditions of some of our staff.
‘Any staff facing a reduction in grade would have their current salary protected in line with the council’s policy.’
He added that the authority would have to stop paying a £389,500 annual nursery subsidy as a result of reduced central government funding of £45.5m ‘over the next few years’.
The GMB plans to publish the results of its petition later in the summer. Mr Turner said currently the number of signatories was between 300 and 400.
It calculated the average loss of annual earnings among the group of nursery practitioners affected to be between £5,000 and £8,000.