Dear Mr Boucher

Your request for information

I refer to your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which was received on 27 January 2010. Attached is the formal response of Hampshire County Council (Notice of Determination) from which you will learn that we have provided an edited response, with the data on specific agencies being withheld under s43(2).

You requested:

“I am interested in the amounts paid by each school in Hampshire to third parties in relation to temporary staffing cover. My hope is to receive an electronic breakdown of amounts paid

(a) through the department's purchase ledger by school and

(b) in grants, by grantee.

Notes relevant to the information requested:

2. In order to avoid your having to collate information from peripheral systems, I am willing to accept information only from your main system (I would like you to advise which system this is). By main system I mean the system that handles the largest part of the department's expenditure. If grants and supplier payments are made through separate systems, then I would like you to choose the main system for each.

3. The information I require for each supplier/grantee is: Supplier name and total amount paid.

4. I would like the information to cover the year 2008/9. I would accept 2007/8 figures if this is not possible.

This was subsequently clarified with the following information:

1. I wish to receive information on temporary staff only, not full time contracted staff.

2. All temporary supply staff in schools, not just those in teaching posts. I would like the different classifications of cover staff however to be shown on the data if possible.

3. Total expenditure from each school, broken down to show payments made to each individual supplier of staff. If it is hard to obtain individual information on foundation schools, I will accept the best data available for these.

4. Please disregard my reference to grants. I simply wish to receive information on temporary staffing spend.

And further clarification:

Just to clarify point 1. We [Hampshire County Council] sometimes employ temporary/ supply staff on normal rates of pay and pay them directly through the payroll. A typical example would be a short term contract to cover maternity leave. Do you want such contracts included or excluded?

Answer: Please include these payments.

The attached spreadsheet gives the information extracted from the County Council's main accounting system SAP in respect of expenditure by schools on temporary supply staff. Both payments to third parties and the amounts paid to employees by payroll have been aggregated for the 2008/09 financial year so as not to identify individual members of staff or the agencies providing those staff. In addition to payroll items, the lines labelled non agency expenditure - mainly payroll will also include payments to other schools for the use of their staff when providing cover.

To put the expenditure provided on temporary staff in context, the total wage bill for teachers within Hampshire was approximately £412,500,000 for the 2008/9 financial year, with the cost of supply teachers being 4% of the total.

As each school is a separate entity that has the discretion to employ temporary staff through any agency it wishes, Hampshire County Council cannot mandate the use of any supplier. However, in order to help schools work effectively together and maximise their use of resources, Hampshire County Council ran an EU tender process in 2007 and developed a list of suppliers willing to work to a framework contract for temporary staff which schools are encouraged to use. This arrangement is currently being reviewed and another tender exercise is underway. The results of this will be accompanied by publicity to remind schools about the framework agreement, stressing their obligations to access compliant arrangements that meet HCC safeguarding, employment and tendering requirements.

The Department for Children, Schools and Families also supports schools by operating the Schools Recruitment Service at https://www.schoolsrecruitment.dcsf.gov.uk/ . This service is aimed at helping schools find staff directly, without the need to involve agencies. If this service was used by a Hampshire school, any expenditure would be shown as non agency expenditure - mainly payroll as the staff recruited would be paid through payroll.

I trust this information is useful to you. The attached Notice of Determination outlines the review process if you are unhappy with the response or how your request has been handled

Yours sincerely

Barbara Sorkin

Data Protection & Quality Adviser

Date

Direct Line

Enquiries to

Director of Children's Services & Deputy Chief Executive

John Coughlan CBE

E-mail

Your reference

My reference