Pensions Improvement Programme

What is the Pensions Improvement Programme

In 2024, 28,864 Education and Training Board (ETB) employees who are members of a Pension Scheme are currently paid by Education Shared Business Service and a further with 9,731 retired ETB employees currently paid by the National Shared Services Office (NSSO).

The Education Shared Business Service (ESBS) established the ETB Pensions Improvement Programme to address a number of superannuation issues in terms of legislative compliance which were in existence across the ETB sector in areas such as:

• Calculation of Pension Contributions
• Calculation of Referable Amounts (SPS Only)
• Issuing of Pension Benefit Statements
• Uploading of Single Pension Scheme Databank files
• Application of Increases for ETB Pensioners

Project Teams were established to resolve the issues and to date, the following progress has been made:

• The system has been updated to ensure it is calculating the correct contributions for over 95% of members.
• Thirteen ETBs have been supported in Single Public Sector (SPS) Pension Scheme compliance by providing the ETBs with 11,043 benefit statements and 12,945 leaver statements to issue to their members. A plan is in place to issue SPS statements for the remaining ETBs by end Q4 2024.
• ESBS have uploaded 143 membership files, 176 beneficiary files and 176 purchase and transfer files to the SPS Databank for the years 2013 to 2023.
• ESBS has supported the National Shared Services Office (NSSO) with updating of their pensioner configuration and ETBs with cleansing of pensioner data to allow for efficient application of pension increases for 98.93% (9,627 of 9,731) of ETB Pensioners.
• Reports have been built to calculated service history for part time hourly paid staff which will be scripted into the service history in the pension module for legacy scheme members to assist with the production of benefit statements for these cohorts.

Final Outcomes

• When the SPS Project and Service History projects are finalised, ETB staff will be able to run an automated pension benefit statement at any time through their portal accounts.
• A report to produce the annual membership databank file will be available for ETBs to run through the Analytics tool Power BI and then upload the file annually to the databank.
• When the NSSO project is completed and all ETB Pensioners are cleansed as per ETB instruction, pensioners will receive their pension increases automatically once the scales and allowances linked to their pension have been updated on the system. This has moved from a highly manual process of applying increases individually to pensioners on instruction by ETBs to a more efficient digital approach based on common configuration.