Author: Billie Loebner

https://uculondonmet.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/solidarity-to-londonmet/

#savelondonmet #saveourreps

Yesterday our branch chair Mark Campbell and secretary David Hardman were made redundant in what is an outrageous attack on their strenuous and tireless trade union activties defending jobs and education at London Met.

More information about the campaign will be posted soon. For the moment, please support us by taking a photo with this poster share it on social media and please send a copy to us uculondonmet@mail.com or post it on our FB page

Here is a message from Mark, 30 April 2016

When they knock you down – get back up and hit them harder

Dear comrades and friends,

On behalf of David Hardman and myself, many thanks for the very many messages we have already received from so many of you following yesterday’s notification (in my case by email as I’m currently off sick after a serious back injury) of our compulsory redundancy from London Met.

We, and our union branch, recognise this for exactly what it is. An attempt to victimise active trade unionists and intimidate other staff into silent acquiescence for whatever educational destructive measure management wish to pursue.

Well, neither David nor I have any intention of being cowed and intimidated by those that know the price of everything and the value of nothing. We have a duty to fight to defend our members and the interests of our students and will continue to do so with vigour and as loudly as we possibly can.

However, this fight is not just about us, we are but two of a number of excellent educators who are being targeted as being surplus to requirements, whether permanent or our essential HPL comrades who are battling against the appalling zero-hour contract at London Met and further reductions in their hours. Our fight is therefore for all those targeted with redundancy – both open and in shadows, not just ourselves.

Also, what is quickly becoming evident is almost all those selected for dismissal are committed UCU members and educators that have on many occasions had the courage and principles to stand up and be counted. Those members, and ourselves, are now what our current VC, John Raftery, describe as the ‘actively disengaged’ who need to be ‘managed out’ of the university. He also had previously had the gall to suggest this will be to improve and support the student experience! Yes, we are disengaged – but not from our students. We are disengaged from a management that puts its own wellbeing above the interests of our students and the working class communities we are proud to serve.

We will shortly be launching a significant campaign to defend the right to speak out, to support union organisation, and defend staff jobs, terms and conditions – the real root to improving the student experience. We are also very happy to suggest to senior management some very specific cost savings that won’t in the slightest damage the student experience – but then again, turkeys seldom vote for xmas!

In the meantime, we would be grateful if you could visit our blog at the following web address, download the A4 poster, take a photo with it in solidarity, and post it on social media (emailing us a copy).

https://uculondonmet.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/solidarity-to-londonmet/

In solidarity

Mark…

Mark Campbell, London Met UCU (Chair)

UCU Left HE Pay Leaflet

It is time to get organised to win the industrial action ballot:

• This postal ballot opens on 14 April and runs until 4 May.
• Members will be asked whether they are prepared to take strike action and action short of a strike.
• We need to convince members to vote – we want a good turnout
• We need to explain to members that they need to vote YES to both questions.

Why we need to fight

As we begin our ballot, the Government is weak, split and under attack from all sides.

David Cameron is floundering under allegations about his family’s tax avoidance schemes, Iain Duncan-Smith has resigned and the government has totally failed to respond to the steel crisis.

They face an industrial challenge from junior doctors over new contracts, and from our sister union, the NUT, over forced academies.

Our employers use the Government ‘austerity’ pay freeze to justify holding down our pay. Division at the top increases our chances of success. Opposition from below offers us opportunity for joint action.

Compared to what our salaries were worth in 2009, our pay has fallen by 14.5% in real terms. If we do not take action it will continue to decline.

From April, all members of USS will pay more and get a ‘career average revalued earnings’ (CARE) scheme. Members of the old Final Salary scheme will pay an additional 0.5% of pre-tax salary in contributions. Members of the old CARE scheme pay an additional 1.5%. TPS members were hit by big increases a year ago. Also from April, our National Insurance payments (NICs) increased – from 10.6% from 12%.

At the same time the value of our pensions (which is ‘deferred pay’), has been reduced. The only way we can make up the difference is if our salary increases. We need a pay increase or 2-3% (or, for some TPS members, a lot more) just to stand still!

The employers have offered us a grand total of 1% – a pay cut of between 1% and 4% depending on personal circumstances – before taking into account inflation, which will devalue it even further. Housing and travel costs are still going up, even if headline inflation is low.

The employers can afford to pay more. The Guardian recently exposed the fact that the HE employers are sitting on a £1.8bn surplus as a result of tuition fees. Indeed, whereas much of the public sector is being starved of cash by a Tory Austerity Government, Universities are not poor. Instead they are siphoning funds into speculative capital projects and increasing their reserves with annual surpluses.

The pay squeeze

We face a group of intransigent employers who see systematically reducing expenditure on salaries (i.e., paying staff less) as a key strategic aim.

In the 1970s, around 70% of Universities’ total expenditure was spent on pay. Now the UK average is a shocking 55%.

These figures represent the total expenditure on staff costs – salaries, pensions, tax, etc.

Since 2008 the employers have complained that staff costs are going up. They even say that staff are not losing out from pay cuts because of pay progression (this is of course nonsense if you think about it).

This is untrue. The trend is downward, as the graph shows. Employers are spending less and less on their staff every year. (Indeed, privately, they even boast about this in their accounts.)

Far from staff becoming an expensive burden, the opposite is true. More and more of Universities’ expenditure is going in other directions – new buildings, new campuses, contractors paid out of capital budgets, and other dodgy practices.

Students are paying more for their education than ever before. But that money is not going to pay staff.

The pay claim

The joint trade union claim figure is for a modest 5%. A 5% increase would offset our losses from pension contributions and arrest the long-term decline in the value of our pay.

The employers have offered us a mere 1%. However, the fact that they started with 1% rather than a lower offer as in previous years shows that they are worried about us taking action. Indeed, institutions are internally budgeting for 2%, as anyone who has submitted a research grant recently would tell you.

What else are we fighting for?

The pay claim includes specific measures to tackle low pay, the gender pay gap and casualisation, as well as proposing a nationally-agreed minimum rate for external examiners.

Our demands are living wage and minimum rates of pay for all roles, including academic ones, action to close the gender pay gap by 2020, and nationally agreed action to reduce the proportion of staff on casual and zero-hours contracts (and to ensure that these staff are paid the same rates as permanent staff).

The pay of UCU members in HE varies greatly. Some members, particularly those on casualised contracts of different types, are extremely low paid. There are still significant gender and race pay gaps, some of which are tied to casualisation (i.e. that women tend to get more insecure jobs).

Do all staff need a pay rise?

Some colleagues may think they are personally well-paid. What do we say to them?

Some staff, particularly older staff, are on higher salaries. However, if you are significantly better paid than more junior staff then sooner or later the University will come looking to make you redundant! The graph above is the result of years of holding down pay and downgrading the profession. Thus many professors at University College London are finding themselves targeted for so-called ‘voluntary’ severance. If they leave, they are replaced with junior lecturers and teaching fellows on a third to half their salary. The bigger the gap, the bigger the incentive for management to pressure senior staff into retiring early.

In particularly impoverished areas of Britain, having a university job is relatively well-paid compared to other jobs available locally. But exactly the same squeeze is taking place in those institutions as elsewhere. It does not benefit the low paid in the region for university staff to accept a pay cut! The employers just pocket the difference. Lower paid staff in a local University means less money circulating in the local economy.

More generally, as the graph shows, if we don’t fight over pay, the employers get away with paying less overall, and take our ‘generosity’ for granted. The rate for the job falls and all staff lose out. If we do fight, we can raise everyone’s salaries, including the lowest paid.

A fight for the future

There is widespread resistance to the Tory Government’s ‘Austerity’ programme. Public pressure and campaigning by groups like Disabled People Against Cuts prevented the cuts to disability benefits. FE lecturers in Scotland won a significant victory after only a few days of industrial action.

There is huge support for the junior doctors. We need to relate to this growing sense of anger at the injustice of pay cuts and austerity. The junior doctors’ and teachers’ disputes in England, and the FE lecturers’ victory in Scotland, shows that there is support for a well-funded public sector.

We have an opportunity to join with doctors and teachers for a broad campaign in defence of pay and the public sector. Our case for a pay increase in HE is obvioiusly connected to the wider question of who should pay for austerity – tax dodging corporations, politicians and bankers – or the majority of the population compelled to work for a living.

We are the custodians for Higher Education for future generations. Fighting over pay means defending realistic job prospects for the next generation, one already burdened with student debt. Many of our students are our future colleagues. If we stand up and fight over pay we will be a force to be reckoned with over the Tories’ Green Paper and their forthcoming White Paper and HE Bill.

What you can do

We are fighting on pay, casualisation and equality. We are also fighting to defend and improve Higher Education in the interests of everyone in society. We need to make this argument publicly and confidently.

We can fight and win. To do so we need to organise. The first step is to Get the Vote Out.

• Organise a meeting aimed at reps and activists. Advertise it across the membership on a broad basis, e.g. ‘Pay – what is at stake and why we need to fight’. Have a plan for all members who turn up. Each member can be asked to contact a small number of colleagues and put to them the arguments for voting for strike action and action short of a strike.
• Organise a branch meeting, and invite speakers from the other unions and student union activists. Contact UCU HQ for a speaker.
• Plaster the campus with posters publicising the ballot and get leaflets to all members.
• Ensure that all members are contacted personally to encourage them to vote, and follow up by phone and emails.
• Organise stalls and use the opportunity to recruit more members. Even if they will not be able to vote in the ballot they will be able to take part in the action.
• Have meetings with students and ask them to pass a motion of support and solidarity.

Sean Vernell seven years ago wrote, Don’t get young in third millennium  – Capitalism and the demonising of the young working class, a pamphlet that explored the conditions of young peoples lives in Britain today.

Recent surveys reveal that the plight of the young working class is even worse in 2016 . UCU left has launched a timely e-version of the pamphlet: Don’t get young in the Third Millenium!

Below Sean Vernell writes an afterword to the pamphlet.

Afterword

The young working class is paying the price for austerity…

In the summer of 2009 I wrote a pamphlet called Don’t get young in the Third Millennium! -Capitalism and the demonising of the young working class as an attempt to challenge the pervading orthodoxies about young people. I did so because I was sick and tired of the continual tabloid attacks on young people as “feral” and “criminal”. I also believed that young people would be at the forefront of shaping their own and therefore the rest of society’s destiny.

The pamphlet provided evidence of the appalling conditions of the young working class. Seven years on a spate of reports reveal that these conditions have got worse.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission reported that those under 34 had suffered the biggest drop in income and employment since the coalition government took office in 2010. Young people under 34 have found their pay hit hardest and that they were the group that found it most difficult to find decent housing, employment and were more likely to experience poverty.

With the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the raising of university fees the young working class are more in debt than ever before.

A Guardian investigation into the impact of the global economic crisis on millennials  stated that;

‘It is likely to be the first time in industrialised history, save periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have fallen so far when compared to the rest of society.’

In 2015 the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Research found that 83,000 young people had been accommodated by local authorities and homeless services in 2014. A shocking 8% of 16-24 year olds said that they had experienced homelessness and in London homelessness had risen by 40%. This is before government plans to scrap housing benefit for the 18-21 year olds has been implemented. All housing charities expect this vicious attack on young people’s ability to claim housing benefits will lead to a further significant deterioration of housing conditions.

There has also been a significant deterioration of young people’s mental health. 150,000 young people attended accident and emergency departments last year. It is estimated that one in 12 young people are thought to have injured themselves…

… and sill get blamed for all the ills of society

The government and the right wing media continue to attack young people. They raise all the old clichés about the “criminal classes”, “parental discipline”, “greed” and “lack of “British values”. Michael Gove, when he was education minister, asked the question,

“Why has a culture of greed and instant gratification, rootless hedonism and amoral violence taken hold in parts of society?”

The breathtaking hypocrisy and stupidity of such a question beggars belief. Young people are shaped, as we all are, by the world in which we live; greedy bankers who wreck economies and then get wealthier, politicians on the take who don’t get arrested, police officers who beat and murder but rarely, if ever, get brought to justice. We live in a society where we are told that being rich and famous is the path to happiness and fulfillment. The survival of the fittest, get rich quick, dog eat dog morals that are drummed into our young, day in day out, are the ones that we are supposed to live by. They see the wealthy flaunt their riches ensuring their own children are secure and happy, whilst knowing that they will never have this for themselves or their families, no matter how long they work or how hard they study.

Surveillance of young people through government initiatives like the Prevent duty represent a significant attack. This attempt to divide our communities through Islamophopia and racism marks a new turn in the government’s attempts to control and marginalise the young working class.

The problem is not intergenerational – it’s capitalism

The cause of the plight of young people is too often explained as an intergenerational one. The greed and selfishness of the baby boomers of the 1950s we are told are to blame for the immiseration of the young today. The root of the problems that young people face, however, are not because one generation cleaned out the cupboard before anyone else could get there! The problem is a system that cannot deliver a better life for all those that live in it, a system that puts the pursuit of profit and individual greed above the rational planning and collective creativity of the young and old.

We continue to hear complaints about how the young are too apathetic. This is a superficial and impressionistic understanding of what informs the thinking of young people today. They are shaped by the experience of the growing inequality and the unjust nature of the political system that they have grown up in. Yes, they are alienated by plastic politicians who have dominated political life for so long. But they are very enthusiastic, inspired and energised by Bernie Saunders and Jeremy Corbyn, political leaders who put forward an alternative to the pro-austerity policies of the establishment politicians.

From the campaign for £10 per hour for fast food workers and the junior doctors to the mass mobilisations against austerity, racism and climate change the young working class are at the heart of the resistance to create a more equal and just society.

The Governments’ attempts to vilify and demonise the young working class reflect their fear of them. They are right to be fearful. It is their energy, dynamism and sense of injustice that will be able to unleash the forces that can bring about a new society that does not waste the potential collective capacity of all.

It would be naïve to think the government are pursuing an ambitious policy of creating three million apprenticeships by 2020 out of genuine concern for our young people’s futures. It may be more realistic to believe that they are doing so because of the needs of the economy.

However in an article in last week’s Private Eye (4.2.16) it was revealed that even this wholly inadequate employment policy is too generous a reason to understand the Tories’ motivation. The article revealed that one of the biggest providers Paragon has ‘historic links’ to the Tory party. This organisation runs apprenticeships for over 4,000 adults and young people and has been allocated more than £17m from the Skills Funding Agency (SFA).

The company is owned by a private equity firm called Sovereign Capital. This firm was founded in 1988 by Lord Nash. He was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools in January 2013. He and his wife are regular donors to the Tory Party.

Although Nash cut his links with the firm on becoming a minister it seems ‘the old boy’ network that ensures that public money gets into the pockets of their close friend is alive and well.

It certainly doesn’t seem to be value for money according to Ofsted who have just inspected the organisation and awarded Paragon, one of the lowest grades that ‘requires improvement’. Ofsted concluded its report by saying that ‘too few learners have completed the qualifications because many learners have left their course’ and that few who had finished had found jobs.

Nothing new

The Tories have a history of awarding FE contracts to dodgy private firms. There have been three main stages of introducing private providers into FE. The first was in 1983 when the Thatcher government introduced YTS and private training schemes which quickly disappeared without trace.

The second phase was called ‘franchising’ after Incorporation in 1993, when government severed the links between colleges and local councils. This episode brought with it a series of high profile scandals involving several colleges. This was uncovered by NATFHE, led by Paul Mackney, who at the time was the West Midlands regional official.

Franchising meant allowing student numbers to expand through using private providers. For example, Bourneville College were caught out creating ‘phantom registers’. Out of their 4,500 franchised students 4,000 did not exist. In Handsworth College, in the West Midlands, a street near the college became known as the ‘Street of 1,000 registers’ because there were so many fake registers with false addresses. Paul Mackney describes how he used to go down the street looking for house numbers that either did not exist or were lock ups!

The College split the money raised between themselves and the franchisee.

The extent of this corruption was exposed when the Principal of Stoke on Trent College, whilst on leave facing disciplinary issues, was found to be running a pub in Mid Wales!

The third phase was ‘individual learning accounts’ introduced by the Labour government again leading to many dubious and fraudulent practises.

All these schemes have come and gone. All have left the sector’s reputation in tatters but more importantly all have spectacularly failed to resolve one of the enduring problems that has haunted British society for the last 35 years – the institutionalisation of youth unemployment.

It is clear we cannot rely on this government to resolve this issue. This is why we have organised the Defending Further and Adult Education; Shaping the future conference on the 5^th March so that students, practitioners and educationalists can come together to work out a real alternative to the privatising agenda of the Tories and their corporate friends.

Register today click here https://www.eventbrite.com/e/defending-further-and-adult-education-shaping-the-future-tickets-20057125402

Sean Vernell, UCU City and Islington College Coordinating Secretary and National Negotiator

UNISON members in FE have voted by a margin of 2:1 to strike against the imposition of the employers 0 percent pay ‘offer’. UCU have a live ballot and will be joining UNSION for the first time in ten years in a joint national strike across all English colleges on Wednesday February 24th to demand £1 per hour extra for all.

UNISON and UCU members who have seen their pay cut in real terms by 15 percent over the last five years are furious with the employers’ insulting offer. With thousands of job losses over the last few years staff who are left working in the sector are faced with spiralling workloads making their job nearly impossible to carry out effectively. But not everything in the sector is being cut. It is a common joke within the sector that only one thing in FE rises year on year – principals’ pay! Many earn five times that of main grade lecturer and seven times that of support staff.

A reflection of how angry people are about their pay is the fact that in just one day eleven thousand people clicked on to UCU’s new ‘Rate for the Job’ on line tool.

The strike will take place in the context of the biggest government offensive against Further and Adult Education since Incorporation in 1993. Adult Education has been hit with a 40 percent cut resulting in thousands of job losses last year and four hundred thousand student places disappearing. That is on top of the one million student places that have been lost since 2010.

Alongside these cuts the government have launched their Post 16 area reviews for ‘fewer but more resilient colleges’ – a rationalisation programme that some are predicting could see the sector shrink from three hundred colleges to one hundred.

At a time when there are eight hundred thousand 16-24 year olds without work, education or training and 15 percent of 16-65 year olds who have no qualifications whatsoever this is a national scandal.

The NUT are also set to ballot their members working in Sixth Form Centres against the government’s plans to shrink the sector. The next stage in our campaign to defend working class education must be to organise a programme of coordinated strike action uniting all three unions.

Campaigning works

Recently we have managed to get more sympathetic media coverage than ever before.

The last year has seen significant mobilisations against these attacks. There have been three parliamentary lobbies involving hundreds of students and staff, a fifteen hundred strong march on city hall as well as numerous days of action and Downing Street protests. One of the successes of the campaign so far has been to ensure more people know about what FE does. For example the fact that over three and half million people attend FE and the sector teaches more 16-18 year olds than any other sector, enrolling on a wide range of vocational and academic courses.

It is widely accepted that the government’s spending review did not cut the sector’s budget quite as deeply as everyone feared because of this campaign.

On the 5^th March there is a major conference, Defend Further and Adult Education; shaping the future. This conference will bring together hundreds of practitioners, educationalists and students from across the country to discuss how we can develop an alternative to the government’s narrow educational agenda and to continue to build a movement to defend second chance education. Register now by clicking here  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/defending-further-and-adult-education-shaping-the-future-tickets-20057125402

Locating our fight to defend working class education in the battle against austerity.

Our fight to defend the sector takes place whilst millions of people are suffering the same attacks as we are. As more economic turmoil looks set to hit the global financial markets governments and employers once again are trying to blame immigrants and working people for their incompetence and greed. The introduction by the Tories of a new (anti) Trade Union Bill is their attempt to make it even more difficult for people to mobilise against their attacks on our services. This is why we should see our campaign as part of that wider battle against austerity.

Governments across Europe have increased their racist rhetoric in the past month chillingly reminiscent of the 1930s. Cameron’s threats to deport Muslin women if they refuse to learn English came in the same week as the press revealed that refugees were given wrist bands to identify them as migrants, were housed in homes with red doors and the Danish government passed a law that made it legal to confiscate refugees belongings to pay for their care.

We need to make sure that the fight against racism and for equality is at the heart of the resistance against austerity. UCU has called a day of action against racism in the workplace on 10^th February and on the 19^th March (as http://www.standuptoracism.org.uk/ ) part of the UN’s international week of action against racism have called a national demonstration.

One of the important changes that has taken place within the last six months has been the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. It is a breath of fresh air to see the leader of the Labour party supporting strikes, joining an anti-racist demonstration in Calais and making it clear that the next Labour government, if elected, would restore the EMA.

At the London UCU rally on our last strike day John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor, spoke in support of our strike and Gordon Marsden, shadow FE Minister, told the audience that he supported all the demands of UCU’s FE charter https://www.ucu.org.uk/fecharter

I would encourage all those who want to see Jeremy as Prime Minister in 2020 to support the Jeremy 4PM tour JC4PM Tour Facebook page taking place over the next couple of months. The tour is not only to build support for Corbyn’s campaign but also to build the demonstration called by the People’s Assembly on April 16^th.

This is going to be an important mobilisation against austerity. It has been themed as a march for homes, health, jobs and education (national demonstration on Saturday 16 April.) On the day we need to ensure that UCU has its own contingent with the defence of Further and Adult Education at the centre of it.

It matters who leads our union

The NEC and Vice Presidential elections now taking place in UCU are not disconnected from the issues discussed above. There is a clear choice in the elections for these seats. There are those standing in this election who have been at the centre of organising resistance and action to defend FE/HE and those who have not. We have a choice between those who have been active in their branches, doing casework, leading campaigns and fighting redundancies and those who have not, and we have a choice between those who are building their regions through taking initiatives to ensure that the future of our students and members are secured and those who are not.

I know who I will be voting for (https://uculeft.org/2016/01/ucu-vice-president-and-nec-elections/)

Sean Vernell, UCU Coordinating Secretary City and Islington College and National negotiator.

As David Cameron pushes for MPs to support British air strikes on Syria Sean Vernell explains why young people see it differently.

Last week the students in my GCSE English classes discussed what their thoughts were about the Paris shootings. They read two opposing views on what the British government’s response should be. One, from the Daily Express, argued that the British government should launch air strikes and close the borders. The other, from Stop the War Coalition, argued that there should not be any retaliatory airstrikes because it will continue the cycle of violence.

As usual, when young people are given the opportunity to discuss these kinds of issues they were fantastically articulate and well informed. They were shocked to find out after reading the Daily Express article that in 1939, at the outbreak of the WW2, 80,000 German people that were connected to Britain were rounded up and put into camps to ascertain their loyalty to Britain. The Express advocated closing the borders and rounding up refugees from areas where ISIS and other terrorist organisations operate from.

The students on the whole were very uncomfortable with the idea that refugees who are fleeing countries that have been continuously at war for over a decade should then be detained in camps to check if they were suitable to be granted asylum in the west. Especially when students raised the fact that most of those who carried out the killings in Paris were actually born in France or Belgium.

The majority of my students were opposed to launching air strikes on ISIS as a way forward after the Paris shootings. They could not understand why ordering more air strikes would help to stop more death and destruction.

‘ …war is a fact – peace isn’t’

They were also horrified to be shown pictures from the Metro newspaper, that a student had brought in, which showed graffiti on the sides of the bombs being loaded onto the jet fighters that said, ‘From Paris with love’. One asked ‘Surely this is not legal’. They could not comprehend why, despite such atrocities that took place in Paris, someone would be so callous as to write something like this on the side of a weapon that they know will kill more innocent civilians then the intended terrorist targets.

Not all were convinced that bombing shouldn’t happen, not because they thought that it would resolve anything but as one student said, ‘when I look around the world war is a fact – peace isn’t’. Most in my classes are between the ages of 16-18. It is a sad fact that this generation has grown up in a society that has been at war for the vast majority of their lives.

A young female student responded to her classmate’s pessimism by saying, ‘The way we make peace a fact is to think it ourselves and get someone else to think it and then peace can become a fact’.

Rage at a society that doesn’t listen to them

The discussion then moved on to why young people, in some cases as young as fifteen, get involved in such bloody killings. Again the students, whilst none of them condoned what took place in Paris, expressed articulately why some young vulnerable people fall prey to those who wish to enlist them to kill and maim.

They expressed the alienation they felt. The horrible frightening feeling of thinking about their futures where there is no security in meaningful employment. A future of living in overcrowded accommodation. Rage at a society that doesn’t listen to them or take them seriously. The racism and Islamophobia that they experience on a daily basis.

This is the context that many young working class people are brought up in. Some of the most vulnerable in this situation, when offered a fake way out dressed up as a heroic cause, tragically grasp it as a way to give their lives meaning. Of course it doesn’t, it just leads to young people’s lives being lost far too prematurely.

The government’s response to this situation will only perpetuate the causes of violence. Trust must be the central factor that cements the student/teacher relationship. If the student feels that their discussion will be reported back to the authorities and after which they are put on an ‘at risk’ list, because of what they had said in that discussion did not support the government’s view, then the opportunity to have an open discussion about how they feel about certain issues will disappear and with it any possibility to inspire hope and understanding.

This is what the government’s Prevent duty is doing and why it is so dangerous and must be resisted.

Cycle of poverty and dead end jobs

As young people feel that there is no way out of a cycle of poverty and dead end jobs or no jobs, communities risk turning in on themselves. Two months ago I watched helplessly from my ninth storey window as paramedics desperately tried to save the life of a seventeen year old boy called Marcel. He lay on the cold concrete path beneath me for an hour as the paramedics tried to resuscitate him, but died from his knife wounds.

A recent report the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) revealed that that young people suffered the biggest slide in income and employment and faced higher barriers to achieving economic independence and success than five years ago. This inequality, according to the report has worsened since the election of the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010.

What is the government response to this catastrophe? To bomb a country that has already been bombed backed to the Stone Age and to make it even more difficult for young people from working class backgrounds to access further and higher education. Both of which can lead, as has been shown in the past, to more terrorist attacks and violence on our streets.

However the government’s spending review also revealed that they are a weak government with a tiny majority. The movement against austerity and the election of an anti-austerity Labour leadership has forced the government to make U-turns on Working tax benefits and cuts in the NHS. Agreeing to protect FE funding for four years is another indication of their vulnerability.

But they will continue to cut where they think they can get away with it. We must not let them. They must be stopped before this generation is written off as another ‘lost generation’.

Luckily for us, many of my students are not people who just take things lying down. They will continue to resist.

‘Reviewing post 16-education and training institutions’ is the title of the government’s latest policy document for further and adult education. Needless to say it is a review that, if implemented, will drastically reduce the size of the sector and with it the future of millions of students.

The government argues that the sector needs to change to ensure that young people and adults have the necessary skills and education to enter/re-enter the workforce. However it doesn’t take much examination of these proposals to see what really lies behind them.

Click here for the UCU briefing on the background to the government review of FE, a critique of it and an alternative to it

Also click here for UCU’s guide to branches who face merger with another college