Agency Worker Regulations (AWR) - a practical guide for nursery managers
What are the Agency Worker Regulations (AWR)?
A 2010 law giving agency workers similar rights to their directly employed colleagues. There are basic rights immediately, and additional rights after 12 weeks work.
What are day 1 rights?
All the things you might deem to be reasonable - eg access to lockers, a canteen or break room, car parking. Less obviously, but an AWR requirement is for internal job vacancies to be made known to agency workers.
Rights after 12 weeks?
All the rights from before, plus:
- equal pay (including overtime, bonus schemes)
- equal holiday
- other perks such as lunch vouchers
12 week calculation:
This is more complicated.
The law specifically thinks about workers who jump around different places and so it allows for natural breaks of up to 6 weeks, and it also allows for sick and maternity/paternity leave. It also includes if the worker comes via different agencies (!). And if your nursery group has 12 sites, then each of those sites are counted in the 12 week counter.
This means that counting to 12 can be tricky because the 12 week count may happen over a period of as much as a year or more, and if you are a chain nursery it may happen over many different sites.
Who's responsibility is it to count?
It's both the nursery and the agency. The agency can see what each worker is doing though them, but only the nursery can see staff attendance from multiple agencies.
What should nursery managers do?
The basic is to keep a central record of agency staff attandance. If you are in a group, someone in head office might be the best person to hold the record as they can collect information from all the different sites.
What happens to the charge rates after 12 weeks?
The agency will need to be given the equivalent pay and benefits so we can calculate the change to the worker's pay. Once this is done there may be a change to the charge rate. However in our experience, agency and nursery pay and benefits are often quite similar so this results in a minor, or sometimes zero change in charge rates.
Of course if your pay rates are very different there will be a corresponding charge rate increase - eg some school pay rates can be substantially higher.
And our small print....
Please remember that we're not lawyers, we're just trying to give a good feel for how these things work. As cases come up we often learn something new.
If you're new to AWR then we hope this is a useful starting point but do have a chat with your HR team and satisfy yourself of a route forward.
As we have joint legal responsibility in this, we're super happy to talk about it so reach out to us - we're partners!
Tel: 0113 328 0668.
Email: hello@nexter.co.uk
