Pensions Improvement Programme

What is the Pensions Improvement Programme

In 2023, 23,492 Education and Training Board employees were members of a Pension Scheme, with 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
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.
Nine ETBs have been supported in Single Public Sector (SPS) Pension Scheme compliance by providing the ETBs with 5,461 benefit statements and 5,739 leaver statements to issue to their members. A plan is in place to issue benefit statements for the remaining ETBs by end Q2 2024.
ESBS uploaded 80 membership files to the SPS Databank in 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 93.2% (8,698 of 9,333) of ETB Pensioners.

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.