Thursday's strike by public sector unions had a limited impact according to Wandsworth Council.

They claim that nine out of ten council staff worked as normal today despite the widespread industrial action affecting public services in other parts of the country. According to their figures only three per cent of Town Hall staff took part in the strike with most of the participants being teachers or other school based staff.

The Council say that most frontline services continued to operate as normal although there was some disruption in local schools.

Out of 81 schools in the borough, including primaries, secondaries and special schools, 12 were closed. This figure consists of 11 primaries and one special school for blind and partially sighted children.

Twenty four primary schools are totally unaffected by the strike while the rest, including all the borough’ secondaries and its special schools, were open but some lessons and classes have been disrupted.

Out of a total town hall workforce of 6,529, including teachers and other school-based staff, 5,818 are worked normally according to figures supplied by the Council.

The total number who took strike action is 711. This included 385 teachers and 260 non-teaching school based staff. This represents 27 per cent of teachers working at council maintained schools in the borough and 11 per cent of other school employees.

Of staff working at the town hall, only 66 out of a total of 2,887 went on strike. This represents less than three per cent of non-school based employees.

In total less than 11 per cent of all staff took part in the nationwide strike action, which has been called by most of the teaching and public service trade unions including the NUT, GMB, Unison and Unite.

We asked Unite for a comment on the Council's figures and await a response.

July 11, 2014