UCU’s National Executive Committee (NEC) met on Friday for the first time since the general election, in the midst of turmoil in UK and international politics and crises in post-16 education. This was the first time the union’s elected leadership has had an opportunity to focus upon strategies to defend post 16 education.

NEC was also meeting in the aftermath of the visible rise of the far right in the UK, from the explosion of racist violence over the summer and the general electoral success of Farage and Reform UK, through successful mobilisations of antiracists in pushing back the fascist right led by Tommy (Yaxley Lennon) Robinson, to recent Reform UK elections wins.

Internationally, the horror of genocide in Gaza and the global solidarity movement with Palestine continues while Trump’s success in the United States Presidential Election sends shivers down everyone’s spine.

A wave of redundancies has begun across Higher Education as the Hostile Environment racist immigration policies of recent Tory governments has led to a fall in international student applications, and falling student fee income is hitting University finances hard. At the same time, the Labour government has announced a £300m boost to FE funding, but failed to address falling pay in the sector.

Political campaigning

The General Secretary’s Report highlighted that the union has responded to international and political questions at home.

The Campus Voices for Palestine speaking tour, organised by University and College Workers for Palestine and BRICUP was supported by UCU, saw over 700 attend the meetings with Sundos Hammad from the Right to Education. The week of action “United Against Scholasticide” for Palestinian education from 23rd November culminating with the TUC backed Day of Action on the 28th is now a focus for activists.

The union has also moved to recognise the threat of the far right and to build anti-racist initiatives withing our membership, universities, colleges and prisons. A motion brought by UCU Left on opposing the far right was passed, which calls on the union to publicise protests against the far right and encourage branches to organise meetings and invite speakers from Stand Up To Racism, Black Members’ Standing Committee and local refugee and migrant speakers in. (The full wording of thiso motion is at the end of this report).

Where is the national fightback?

It was clear from the GS report that she and her team have no appetite for national strike action. They provided a pessimistic outlook when it came to acting on the threats facing members in post-16 education, indeed despairing and bemoaning the lack of opportunity to influence the Starmer inner circle.

This pessimism is rooted in the strategy followed by the union in focusing upon local action as opposed to organising for co-ordinated UK-wide action. At a time when the Labour government is vulnerable to strikes and is looking to avoid confrontations with the unions, UCU has pulled back from mobilising members on a national level. Our power is a collective power in which politicians, and our employers, have to act to answer our demands when our pressure becomes impossible to ignore any longer. It does not come from officials having access to political leaders for fireside chats.

The majority of the NEC recognise this, and repeatedly asked for an answer as to why the UK-wide demonstration in defence of post-16 education, voted for at Congress, has not been enacted?Indeed any mention of it was erased from the priorities set out for NEC. The motion called for a demonstration in the Autumn, yet 5 months later, it is unclear if any actions have happened to make this a reality.

A paper was brought to the NEC outlining the union’s priorities over 2024/25. The failure to provide a guarantee that the UK-wide demo would be a priority meant that this paper was not carried. Moreover, the priorities paper didn’t link these “priorities” to motions carried at Congress and sector conferences, which raised serious questions as to how these priorities had been created (and what was missing).

The lack of urgency by officials in HE is also evident by the lack of information available to NEC on the scale of redundancies. In the middle of a major crisis in HE funding, the union is not even able to produce a list of branches facing redundancies or identify the 40% of universities which reportedly have just one month’s cashflow to continue to pay wages!

Within FE, despite the £300m additional funding the Labour Government has committed for 2025/26 the union has no plan for a co-ordinated national plan of industrial action to get any of this funding ringfenced for pay. Neither does it have a plan on how to ensure that FE members get the 5.5% that was awarded to teachers for this year’s pay rise (2024/25).

FE members will be rightly confused and angered when NEU members in Sixth Form Colleges take strike action from the 28th November over securing a 5.5% pay increase for themselves but UCU is still sitting on its hands.

Flawed, undemocratic plans for a hybrid Congress

Unfortunately, due to the length of the GS Report, little time was spent discussing these crucial issues that confront our members.

Instead, NEC was presented with a long debate over how a hybrid Congress in 2025 could be organised.

UCU Congress has never voted for a hybrid Congress, but it has been the goal of some on the NEC. Congress delegates have been far more cautious. There was a vote at Congress 2024 to create standing orders which allowed for a hybrid Congress. (These rely on electronic voting being used, rather than a show of hands or cards.) Following Congress, the NEC in June agreed in principle to move this work forward with a study of the mechanisms to facilitate this.

NEC members were presented with a set of proposals, many of which could have been circulated well in advance. This included a proposal that is not compatible with UCU rules – opening up Congress attendance to all union members as observers (currently a small number of observers are elected, like delegates). It appeared not to have crossed the minds of the authors of this proposal that this would mean that managers could join the union and attend online simply to spy on reps!

There was an almost unanimous rejection of this proposal.

The wider set of proposals that were put forward failed to get a majority. (They would have been voted down if it were not for an NEC member being ejected from the meeting, before the vote took place, resulting in a tied vote.) This means that the paper did not pass, and the ‘status-quo ante’ was the outcome.

This should mean that right now these particular proposals are not agreed, and therefore we have no agreed mechanism for running a hybrid Congress in 2025. During the debate, this was stated by the secretariat when they were asked what would happen if NEC voted down the paper. Unfortunately, this interpretation was changed once the vote was taken, whereupon it was stated that a Congress 2025 would be hybrid!

Problems with a hybrid Congress still stand.

A ‘hybrid’ Congress is suggested to be more inclusive over a wholly in-person event. However, it has become clear that the practical problems of running a Congress meeting are more complex than was first thought. The proposals for a hybrid Congress put to the NEC do not deal with many of the concerns that were raised at Congress, and that NEC members have.

One of the major concerns is that remote participation would actually reduce access.

Many actions to supposedly increase access for some risks the exclusion of others. For example, many carers may find themselves both retaining their carer responsibilities while trying to participate in a three-day Congress online meeting, as they had when Congress was online-only. NEC members had called for proposals to actively engage members with caring responsibilities, to be part of the planning: this was minuted in the June NEC, yet this was absent from current plans.

As anyone who has tried this will know, attempting to participate in an intensive online meeting for three days is far from simple! NEC has been meeting in a hybrid form for over a year. It has seen many times that even a one-day meeting leads to frustration and anger being expressed by delegates on a scale greater than with in-person meetings.

There had been consultation with the Disabled Members’ Standing Committee, but not the other equality standing committees. NEC members raised concerns about how accessible the plans were to disabled and neurodivergent members particularly around how voting would work and the ability to follow debates.

UCU democracy would also be undermined by plans to change a core trade union principle of public voting to private secret anonymous voting. This was something that the elected UCU Democracy Commission spent 1.5 years examining closely. It found that voting anonymously disenfranchises members and branches’ ability to mandate delegates and hold them accountable. By contrast, voting by show of hands in a mass meeting is fundamentally a public shared act, where those who vote own the outcome. They know which way they voted, and which way others in the room voted. It can also mean that people are swayed by debate on the floor of Congress. At this year’s Congress there were debates where members changed their mind because of the way that voting was visibly going in the room.

The paper stated that voting records would not be published. There was nothing in the proposals to deal with how private anonymous voting would allow delegates to ensure that their branch/region motions, which their members had voted for, were being voted on by their elected delegates.

Failure to resolve this issue risks reducing Congress to a collection of individuals making policies rather than members elected by branches (supplemented by elected delegates from regions and committees of the union) making policy.

Similarly, permanent recording of electronic votes cannot be guaranteed to be secure, opening up delegates to potential victimisation at work.

We believe that working to address inclusivity for in-person events would be a far better focus for our union than believing technology is the way to resolve inclusivity.

Review of Racism

UCU is undertaking a review of anti-Black racism in the union in response to concerns by Black staff and members. The paper indicated that the people carrying out the review had been appointed, but that further progress was dependent on the dispute between UCU staff and management being resolved. There was no information about when this would happen. The stalling of the race review is yet another reason to be concerned about how long it is taking to resolve the dispute.

Where do we go from here?

This was a frustrating NEC meeting. An important motion on defending free speech on campus was lost off the agenda due to the length of time debating the GS report and Congress preparations.

Increasingly NEC members are finding a lack of transparency and urgency in our national union’s actions to take on the issues facing the post-16 education sectors. We think reps will have to step up organising at branch and region/nation level and not waiting for HQ.

In FE and HE, UCU Left members are organising meetings to help connect branches and build momentum to ensure that we rise to the challenges facing us all.

Motion: Organising against the Far Right (CARRIED)

NEC deplores:

Reform UK’s attempt to bring racist ideas into the mainstream.
The racist riots following UK fascist Tommy Robinson’s summer demonstration.

NEC applauds the successful mobilisations against recent Far Right demonstrations – central London and Glasgow.

NEC affirms the importance of UCU being actively involved in the fightback against the Far Right.

NEC agrees to:

Encourage branches to set up Anti-racist/anti-facist groups which work together with students, other trade unions, SUTR and local organisations supporting/of refugees and migrants.
Circulate educational materials on dangers of Far Right to all members.
Publicise mobilisations against the Far Right and encourage members and branches to attend with banners, as well as to attend organising meetings and other anti-Far Right events.
Encourage branches to invite speakers from SUTR, Black Members’ Standing Committee and local organisations of/supporting refugees and migrants to speak at branch meetings.

UNITE dispute means NEC is paralysed by its inability to instruct the General Secretary to settle the dispute and fails to look outwards.

Unlike the first meeting of the HEC which dealt with all business, the first meeting of the NEC has been paralysed by its inability to hold the General Secretary to account. Unfortunately it was a very inward looking meeting and failed to orientate the union in a way that can meet the huge challenges facing the post-16 education sectors.

The NEC by rule (28.2 and 29.2) has responsibility to instruct the General Secretary in relation to staff issues. The UNITE staff union’s dispute over racism, bullying and the breaking of the procedure agreement led to the abandonment of the second day of UCU Annual Congress and has now led to the halting of NEC members ability to instruct the GS to resolve the dispute.

A union that fails to have influence in the wider social and industrial environment it operates within, building confidence within its branches and the rank and file, inevitably begins to focus on control over internal structures. It is therefore no surprise that the series of complaints that should have been resolved swiftly, robustly and internally in order to avoid a dispute, has now spread into the functioning and representation of the wider union.

Moreover, UCU’s retreat from UK coordinated industrial action over pay, jobs and conditions to a focus on local branch-level action will weaken rather than strengthen the national union. In doing so it leads to the General Secretary suggesting that an incoming Labour Government, under Starmer’s leadership, will repeal anti-union legislation in its first 100 days including the 50% threshold for ballots. It was optimistically suggested that this will open the door to a new era of industrial strength. We hope it does, but it only will if trade unions continue to fight for members – improved pay and conditions will not simply be granted from above.

It was welcome to hear that the Labour Party has approached UCU to hear our solutions to the crises. We need to take any opportunities that we can to shape educational policy under the incoming government. In order to do this we need to build pressure on them to act, we cannot trust them to carry through on their words and platitudes. It was disappointing that the Congress decision to call a national demonstration in the Autumn term was not part of the GS report, and that that section was timed out before NEC members could ask about this.

The right wing of our union places the paralysis of our union within a narrative of a dysfunctional NEC impeding the completion of ‘important’ union business. However, by ‘important’ they mean managing bureaucracy and avoiding urgent political questions, such as responding to racism in the forthcoming UK elections or motions from branches.

Very few decisions were taken on how UCU will take forward its important work. A motion was unanimously passed on organising against the CASS report by working with trans-led organisations and to pressure the government to improve trans healthcare. The second motion that was passed originally called to support the work of Stand Up To Racism in opposing the rise of the far-right in the UK. UCU is affiliated to Stand Up To Racism, the organisation that is at the heart of building opposition to the far right in the UK. However, the right in the union wants to over turn this affiliation through amending motions rather than taking the decision to Congress, and so the motion was amended which removed naming SUTR. Nevertheless, NEC did support that UCU members should campaign against the Reform Party and, importantly, to support, mobilise and publicise the counter demonstration against the nazi Tommy Robinson on 27th July. We hope this happens and that we see many UCU members with their banners alongside the rest of the trade union movement to oppose the far right.

Many other motions fell due to time constraints – these covered issues such as defending the student protests. This was an important motion as we have seen hostile management actions and horrendous police aggression against student encampments, particularly at Oxford and Newcastle.

There was very little discussion on Palestine, despite the overwhelming support at Congress for UCU to take action to provide solidarity and build the movement to oppose the war.

Another decision that was taken was to move, in principle, to a hybrid Congress in 2025. At Congress 2024 a change in the standing orders was passed that enabled NEC to consider moving to hybrid Congress. We must ensure our democratic structures and conferences are open to all members, and for some, being able to join online will improve their ability to engage. However, the paper that was brought to NEC had very little detail on how a hybrid Congress would work. This is deeply concerning for issues of democracy and equality.

Being part of a trade union is about feeling the sense of collectivity and solidarity. Attending in person meetings can enable members to meet others from across all our sectors and nations. For many, particularly women with caring responsibilities, it is very hard to take part in an online conference. If members are not encouraged to attend in person, it may seem an easy option to join online so they can continue with their day-to-day duties. However, this can lead to feeling isolated and disconnected. Moreover, disabled members at Congress and NEC spoke of the need to make Congress more accessible. We need to be finding ways to ensure people feel welcome and that Congress has an accessible and family friendly atmosphere, rather than feeling that Congress is not a space for them and that they need to join online.

What is clear from Friday’s NEC is that the national leadership and the right in the union are unable to meet the challenges that we face. We must build a stronger rank and file movement within the union that can create the conditions to push back against this bureaucratic inertia.

Category: NEC

November NEC: UCU Left Report