Contact the NUT Office, 020 8496 5060 or email secretary@wfnut.org without delay because, in law, the non-renewal of fixed term contract, except for the reasons given above, ranks as a dismissal and may, therefore, be an unfair dismissal.
We regard the issuing of temporary contract as an abuse and will take each and every case up.
Please remember that Fixed Term / Temporary contracts should only be used to cover Maternity Leave, a secondment or long term absence.
Anything else is, quite simply, a fixed-term con-trick.
Issuing contracts for budgetary or other unspecified reasons should always be taken up.
Failure to renew a fixed term contract on the same terms as before is, in employment law, a dismissal. If it is a yearly contract then it is legally an Unfair Dismissal. In any case, the NUT regards the non-renewal of these contracts as a dismissal and will ballot members if necessary to protect any member threatened in this way by industrial action.
The best way forward is to get those contracts converted to proper permanent contracts.
Please contact the NUT office if any of your members are on fixed term contracts; and alert us if any are advertised for posts other than those covered above.