Dear all

Hope you are all good and keeping well.  Further to my question re whether any of you were  planning on using the Government's furlough scheme for your invigilators, please see the responses I received below.

Thank you, Jean




Responders
ORIGINAL Q UESTION: Are any of you using the Government's furlough scheme to pay your invigilators?
Additional info
1
our HR Department are looking at it as some of our invigilators have challenged it.  I think the problem being, we fall into a 'gap'.  As public sector employees one could argue we're not covered under the scheme, however, there are certain measures for those on zero-hours contracts (which our invigilators are effectively claiming).  Our solicitors are looking into it so I've no answer to help with I'm afraid just yet.  There's also the consideration of moral duty and whether we make a compensation payment.  There's no guidance yet so I'm awaiting legal advice.

2
As our invigilators are on casual contracts I have been advised by HR that they would not be entitled to pay as we had not committed to employ them for the forthcoming diets. I have not received any advice to date from HR colleagues that our invigilators would be eligible to be furloughed.  For some of my invigilators the loss of income has hit them hard.

3
We're investigating it for our Senior Invigilators (who are on zero hours contracts with the University) but not for our general invigilators.

4
No we aren't furloughing our Invigilators.  They had not been assigned any sessions for the summer exam period.

5
the invigilators used are not directly employed by the University; rather we recruit them via an agency, so no furloughing with us.

6
no, we have not as yet put our zero hours contract invigilators on furlough.

7
We're not furloughing invigilators officially as we gave them a lot of notice but our Executive Board has made a decision to pay casual staff who were already on assignments until end May as a goodwill gesture. Some of our invigilators do work for the University in lots of other roles - some of them are working for about 40 weeks of the year - so our HR team are looking at them on a case by case basis once I've given them the details of who gave us availability for the May exams. I doubt if any of ours will be eligible as the majority just work effectively zero hours but we're still crunching the numbers at the moment.

8
Our invigilators are on casual contracts that state that we are not obliged to offer them work and they are not obliged to accept any work offered to them. We are therefore not offering to furlough any of our invigilators.

9
the question hasn't yet come up for our invigilator group - we did make a payment to invigilators who had given their availability for our busiest exam schedules (May) and we've had a lot of positive feedback in response to this gesture.
we had an initial approach of no work no payment.  May is our heaviest exam schedule and we'd already allocated invigilator hours for the whole month well before lockdown.  A decision was made that those who had been allocated exams to invigilator in May would be paid for that time.  I know there has been a really mixed approach to this in the sector and we certainly didn't get the feeling that one approach was emerging as a 'sector wide' stance so in the end we just went with the decision to pay.  Have you had much challenge to the 'no payment' decision?
10
HR are keeping an eye on guidance and requests, but our position is that we cancelled the exams before we'd started to even look at a rota, or availability so we don't plan to furlough staff. We have a couple that do work for us on a worker contract (similar to zero hour) but work elsewhere, and they are being looked at on an exceptional basis.   Unless the sector make a stance on this, I can't see us changing our position.

11
Our invigilators are on the equivalent of zero hours contracts that state that we are not obliged to offer them work and they are not obliged to accept any work offered to them. We are therefore not offering to furlough any of our invigilators.




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