Unison is currently representing up to 100 Connexions staff in redundancy negotiations in England in the run-up to the April deadline when local authorities will take over the running of the advice and guidance service.

The majority of the cuts are proposed in administrative and managerial positions, including cuts to staff with specialist knowledge.

Jon Richards, senior national officer at Unison's Education Workforce Unit, said: "Local authorities think they can just shift around administrative staff and get away with it. But they have overlooked the fact that often these positions are quite technical and require a different set of skills."

Richards also said that as well as cuts to administrative staff, councils in areas with serious financial deficits were cutting back on frontline staff.

"There is a wholesale snipping away at the service taking place," he said.

Steve Stewart, executive director of Connexions Coventry & Warwickshire, agreed with Unison that expertise could be lost in the transfer to local authorities.

"For instance, in several places they are not transferring staff with a specialist knowledge of the client database. This is knowledge that has been developed over the past seven years and is a key element of frontline delivery, but local authorities are losing this," he said.

A spokesman for the National Association of Connexions Partners said that one of the aims of the transition was to put more resources into frontline staff.

"Part of the agenda was to remove duplication and free up money for frontline staff," he said. "It may be the case that specialist administrative staff are losing their jobs, but they may be replaced at some point in the future. It is really too early to see the effects of cuts."

Richards told CYP Now he expects to see a significant rise in the number of redundancy cases Unison is representing in the run-up to the April deadline for the transition.