TUPE stands for the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, which is a UK law designed to protect employees’ rights when their contract of employment is transferred to a new employer.
This ensures that employees retain their existing terms and conditions of employment and continuity of service and are not dismissed unfairly as a result of the transfer.
Employees who transfer when a school becomes an academy are transferred under TUPE and therefore benefit from the protections of TUPE.
One of those protections is that changes to the transferred contract of employment cannot be made. Regulation 4(4) TUPE sets that out - any purported variation to the contract will be void. Therefore, requiring staff who transfer under TUPE to sign new contracts is not permitted.
TUPE applies to the whole contract. The protection from TUPE does not apply only to certain terms and conditions. The employer cannot pick and choose which bits of the contract are protected by TUPE - it is all protected by TUPE and so there should be no attempt to introduce new contracts.
Employees therefore have the legal right to transfer to the new employer on their existing terms and conditions of employment and with all their existing employment rights and liabilities intact.
Effectively, the new employer steps into the shoes of the old employer and it is as though the employee’s contract of employment was always made with the new employer.
Further information
Your feedback
If you require a response from us, please DO NOT use this form. Please use our Contact Us page instead.
In our continued efforts to improve the website, we evaluate all the feedback you leave here because your insight is invaluable to us, but all your comments are processed anonymously and we are unable to respond to them directly.