After 15 years of seemingly limitless market-led expansion of Higher Education, the UK university sector is facing the biggest crisis in its history. It is worth briefly remembering how we got here. Any solution to the crisis has to talk about how we get onto a stable financial footing, and what that will look like.
The 2010/2011 Willets Plan for English Universities had the following elements: • Up to £9,000 tuition fees for home students (equating to a profit of some £2,000 per student) • Abolition or partial reduction of the block grant subsidy (which was calculated on a quota basis per subject area) • (2014) Abolishing student recruitment caps (apart for regulated courses like Medicine) • (2017) Changing the regulatory regime from a quality assurance model to a deregulated ‘consumer complaints’ one.
These home undergraduate tuition fees were backed up by student loans costing some ~£20bn a year to the Treasury. Alongside increases in home student fees, unregulated overseas student fees were allowed to soar.
This system initially appeared to work, although not how politicians had imagined. First, nearly all universities found that charging less than £9,000 per student did not help them recruit, so the Tory idea of a ‘genuine’ marketplace with different prices turned out to be a pipe dream. Second, faced with a lifetime of debt, students tended to pick subjects they were confident about. Humanities, rather than maths and science courses, found themselves the main beneficiaries. This meant that students tended to repay their loans at a lower level than Willets and co had planned: over the then 30-year loan period, the Treasury reckoned only half the loan would be paid.
Nonetheless, after caps on recruitment went in 2014, many universities gambled on long-term expansion, taking out 20 or 30-year loans to build new campuses. But that was OK, interest rates were at an all-time low and property prices were surging. What could possibly go wrong?
Then in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn nearly found himself Prime Minister as a leftwing Labour Party programme saw his party surge to nearly beating Teresa May (with 40% against the Tories’ 42.4% of the popular vote) – an increase explained in part by the youth vote and a popular call to abolish university tuition fees. In response, the Conservatives announced a review of HE funding, to which the financier Philip Augar was eventually appointed in 2018.
Augar’s review was delayed by first Brexit and then Covid. Augar’s solution, eventually implemented by Michele Donelan in 2023, was to tinker with the market formula, changing the loans system to a 40-year repayment scheme with an RPI rate of interest, and lower earnings thresholds for repayment. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that working class students would pay back more, wealthy students would likely pay less. Whereas the earlier scheme was closer to a hefty 9% graduate tax, the new scheme was more like a Treasury-backed loan, which students would be made to pay. These changes added at least £30,000 to the cost of education over the student’s lifetime – some estimates put figures closer to £60,000.
What would a sustainable alternative look like?
By 2019 the market system was getting close to failure, for anyone who cared to look. In 2020, a rapidly-convened Convention for Higher Education statement was launched in Parliament during the Covid lockdown. The proposals it put forward did not abolish the market system, but were designed to rein it in and address the social inequalities created by the market. They included:
• Restoration of maintenance grants. • Resources to tackle inequalities of access (prioritising social groups in disadvantaged circumstances, whether on the basis of locality, socio-economic class, ethnicity or disability; and to unemployed adult returners). • Immediate reduction in tuition fees by 30%, with the balance made up by the government. • Restoration of student recruitment caps, backed up by direct public funding to support struggling institutions through a temporary dip in recruitment. • Senior salaries should be restricted to a 6:1 ratio, and casualised staff given secure contracts. • Abolition of racist and discriminatory policies towards international staff and students. • Democratisation of internal university governance.
The Convention Statement was supported by the Labour Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Emma Hardy. Her statement at the launch is worth reading, especially in the light of shallow promises from Bridget Phillipson and Jacqui Smith. The Convention’s broad-based efforts in getting the ear of the Government, Lords and Labour in opposition contrasts with UCU’s so-far feeble lobbying campaign.
The fight we need
We cannot fight redundancies of 10,000 a year on a university-by-university basis. We need to take the fight to Government. When that has been done – as in Dundee – the union has been able to spearhead a defence of Higher Education and marshal the overwhelming majority of public opinion in our favour.
University of Dundee planned to cut 632 jobs – the UCU branch took 3 weeks of strike action in February and March. UNISON and UNITE also balloted successfully. Together they built an excellent campaign with large pickets, general meetings and public rallies involving other trade unionists and politicians from the Scottish National Party, Labour and Green Party. But critically they pressured the Scottish government to act. Consequently MSPs questioned University of Dundee management and the Scottish government stepped in providing additional funding. The fight is not over for Dundee – but it shows what can be done when the fight is taken to government.
But most of the time our national union is not pushing out to make the big arguments. Instead union branches have been advised to negotiate locally. Branch reps are being asked merely to hand-hold members as they are escorted through notionally ‘Voluntary’ and inevitably Compulsory Redundancy Consultations. Even when branches are allowed to strike, it is often too little and too late.
Making the big arguments means we have to fight for the future – for the defence of subject areas and departments, as well as for universities and access. That’s why we need to spell out short-term demands as well as long-term goals.
We need to mobilise the whole of the union to take UK-wide action in the face of this crisis. At Congress there are several motions in front of HESC which propose slightly different mechanisms to put together a fight to defend jobs and defend the sector. Ultimately which the union decides to back is for HE Sector Conference to decide. But we should not allow differences in tactics to get in the way of unity around a common plan to mobilise branches, to win ballots and to fight to defend the sector.
Sean Vernell – City and Islington College, NEC and FE National Pay Negotiator
This year’s Congress takes place in one of the most serious political situations faced by those working and learning in the Post-16 education sector for many years.
In HE over 10,000 jobs are at risk this year alone, with another 10,000 staff threatened next year. This crisis is set to get worse. The wiping out of arts, humanities and social sciences in all but the most elitist universities is on the cards.
The government announced a cut of 3 – 6% to the Adult Skills Fund which covers adult education in England FE and local authorities. Subsequently more student places will disappear, on top of the one million already lost in the last decade. In FE the refusal to act on UCU demands of a national binding agreement and pay parity with teachers has led to the worst recruitment crisis in the sector’s history. A crisis that is set to get worse with the predicted 60,000 increase in student numbers in the next two years.
With workloads spiralling out of control across the sectors, physical and mental health issues are rising significantly as staff and students’ conditions worsen.
Post-16 Education is in crisis. And there is worse to come.
It is clear that the strategy pursued by the GS and her team of fighting college by college, university by university, to stem the tide of attacks on the basis of ‘building capacity’ has, at best, simply led to a stagnant membership as we lose more members through redundancy. This strategy has not prepared our branches to be ready to resist the avalanche of attacks that are set to come.
Trump leading the way and Starmer happy to follow.
Trump’s tariff wars are a part of a wider offensive his administration has launched on everything that is progressive.
On the one hand he is attempting to break with the free trade model of running the world, replacing it with a protectionist model that Trump believes will boost the growth of goods made in the US and with it jobs and prosperity. Neither economic models benefit working class people and neither model was designed to do so. Trump’s tariff wars will lead to layoffs in America and elsewhere, it will lead to a general worsening of workers’ living standards just as the free trade agreements did across the world.
On the other hand, Trump is using his ‘war on woke’ to divide workers and make it easier to push through the cuts to make America profitable again. Being tough on ‘illegal’ immigrants is a key component to this offensive.
The attacks on the transgender community are at the forefront of his agenda. A classic tactic used by all far right leaders – target a numerically very small section of society and hold them responsible for working class immiseration.
His attempts to prevent teachers teaching anything the right regard as ‘woke’ is chilling. If a teacher is found ‘guilty’ of teaching equality rights, it can lead to dismissal. The showdown with Harvard and Columbia universities shows how far Trump’s administration will go to enforce his anti-equality agenda.
Starmer is only too happy to follow Trump’s lead out of fear of upsetting the ‘special relationship’. Starmer and Reeves’ economic agenda is to attempt to make Britain profitable again through more cuts in the welfare state. As usual it starts with those receiving benefits and attempts to demonise those who survive on ‘state handouts’.
Whilst Trump cuts US spending on Nato to force European powers to increase their spending on arms, Starmer and Reeves are happy to comply. Starmer has ratcheted up the pre-war rhetoric to justify cuts to welfare – the extra £6bn a year to be spent on arms is apparently “necessary” to deter the apparent ‘real threat’ of a Russian invasion.
This appeasement of the right can be seen in Starmer’s continued support for the genocide in Palestine and his tough action on ‘illegal’ immigrants – keeping in line with Tump and an ineffectively attempting to marginalise Reform UK.
The jettisoning of Labour’s manifesto commitment to spend £28 billion to tackle the climate crisis is another example of how far Starmer will go to appease the far right. Farage, like Trump, blames the woke ‘net zero agenda’ for the loss of the steel manufacturing in Scunthorpe rather than the vagaries of the free market. Starmer, alongside the leadership of the steel workers union, refuses to challenge this lie.
We only have to look to the Birmingham bin workers strike, where a Labour Council is prepared to break the strike with troops, to see how the Labour Government will fiercely try to squash any resistance to its cuts agenda.
However, Starmer’s ‘warfare not welfare’ approach, predictably ‘has given confidence to Farage and Reform UK feeding off working people’s despair. Reform UK, now the largest far right party in Britain ever, is leading Labour in many of the so-called ‘Red wall’ constituencies.
National action to turn the tide on despair.
The only way to stop the far right cashing in on the despair of millions of workers is by providing hope. Resistance provides that hope. At this Congress delegates have the opportunity to vote for motions that can lead to resistance.
This congress and its sector conferences must be councils of war. The first decision we must take is to support motions calling on UCU to organise national action within the sectors and across. Congress and the sector conferences must signal a clear break from the college by college, university by university strategy adopted by the GS and her team. It is irrelevant how we get there – aggregated or disaggregated – as long as we do.
Our colleagues in Newcastle, Dundee and Brunel universities have shown how we can fight. They have been an inspiration to the whole union. We cannot allow them to fight alone.
We have time to rise to the challenge and resist the attacks that are coming and implement the decisions made by HEC and HESC to launch an industrial action ballot on pay. And in FE, to implement the FEC decision for an indicative ballot on pay, workload and a national binding agreement before FESC. Failure to do so gives the employers and government a green light to speed up their attacks on post-16 education.
Lessons are being learnt by the government and the employers – that if they are to win, they must hit us on multiple fronts at once. We no longer live in a world where we can fight one front at a time. If we are to be able to unite in the battles over pay and jobs, we will also need to take up the attacks on benefits, the trans community, migrants and refugees and also take up tackling the climate crisis.
We must argue that the funding of our colleges and universities must be a priority and not an increase in arms spending – we must demand welfare not warfare.
It is now over a year since UNITE declared a dispute with their employer, UCU. The branch is currently taking an unprecedented 20 days of strike action, due to the GS and her senior management team failing to resolve the dispute.
This is wholly unacceptable and has clearly brought the union into disrepute. One would’ve thought that professional negotiators would be able to resolve this dispute without too much difficulty. The fact they have not, makes it clear that they are set to break UNITE in UCU.
UNITE members are rightly angered at the failure by SMT to resolve the dispute. Bullying, harassment and racism have absolutely no place in our union and must be stamped out.
The tactics used by UCU senior management are uncomfortably similar to the worst of what our employers do to us.
Recognising a new union is akin to what some of the Nottingham Miners leaders did in the 1984/85 Miners strike by setting up a scab union, the UDM (union of Democratic Mineworkers). UCU would rightly be robust in its defence if the NEU started to set up branches in colleges and poach members from UCU.
The nature of the UNITE members work means that when they take strike action it will have an impact on UCU members ability to defend their own conditions of service.
It is UNITE members right to run their dispute as they see fit – we call on all UCU members to support and provide solidarity. Please pass motions of support in your branches & regions, and send them to the Unite branch and to the GS and President.
It is vital that UCU Left elected representatives continue to challenge the SMT and GS in their inability to resolve this dispute. The NEC are the employers of the GS, who in turn is the employer of UCU staff – we must continue to use our position to apply pressure on the GS and SMT to resolve this dispute. They may refuse to answer our questions – but they must hear our questions.
It is also vital that NEC representatives push our union’s leadership to address the issues facing UCU members. We have UCU branches on strike in defence of jobs and education who need the full backing of our union. We will do them no favours by abandoning democratic oversight of the GS and her senior officials.
Failure to do so will mean the GS and SMT can continue to run the union as their own personal fiefdom. It will mean giving them more space to do as they see fit, without any recourse to members’ decisions that have been made at Congress or NEC/ FEC/ HEC.
We are facing an unprecedented attack in HE and there is a crisis in FE – however the full-time union leadership are dragging their feet on supporting members.
Unite UCU have not asked NEC delegates to not attend Friday’s NEC and have said those attending should raise their concerns and challenge the GSs report into the dispute.
This is what UCU left delegates will be doing.
UCU members’ ability to hold the leadership to account must be based upon an active branch membership. What happens in the democratic structures matters, but is not a substitute for an active membership.
Solidarity to Unite UCU members fighting for justice.
For more information on the details of the dispute, please go to https://uniteucu.wordpress.com/
UCU Left Steering Committee
Registration for UCU Congress 2025 closes in just over a week (23rd April), and this year it will feel quite different as it is the first hybrid Congress.
It is vital that we make sure as many members are registered as possible so they can participate in vital debates and votes on how UCU resists attacks on pay, jobs, funding, censorship and fights for equality, welfare not warfare and for climate action. A central debate will be whether UCU backs national action to defend the post 16 education sector – this is desperately needed in HE, FE and Adult Education. Every vote will matter, and every member who wants a progressive left union should be encouraged to stand as a delegate.
The calls for a hybrid Congress were in part to try and ensure Congress was more “open” to members. There were debates that it would enable more disabled members, neurodivergent members and those with caring duties a different way to participate, by participating online. Ensuring Congress is accessible is of course essential, however it is important to recognise that online attendance comes with its own barriers, from technology to simply being unable to step away from other responsibilities while participating remotely. It is vital that online participation does not exclude delegates from debates and networking opportunities, but it is not clear that the tech will offer seamless interaction between in person and online spaces.
UCU Left believes that Congress should be an open and welcoming place for all members to attend. The union must do everything possible to ensure the event, its timing, and the location that hosts it are accessible, and members are given sufficient accessibility and caregiver support. Congress is the sovereign decision making body of the union, the decisions taken will determine the future policy of the union, which will hopefully ensure we can turn the tide and ensure we resist the many crises facing us.
There are important benefits of attending in person:
Feeling part of a collective body. Attending Congress is an opportunity to be around other members who want to see change and resist the difficulties we are facing in our workplaces and society. There is a great sense of solidarity meeting other like minded people, which is a great antidote to what can often be quite isolated lives.
Debate and discussion. Members may have certain ideas about motions and how they want to vote, but being in the Congress Hall listening to those speaking, and discussing the ideas with people in the breaks before and afterwards strengthens our collective decision making. Members may put things in a way that we haven’t thought of before, so those conversations off the congress floor can help develop our understanding of where motions and debates are coming from.
Building networks. If you have been to Congress before, you will know that you meet many new people and reconnect with those you already know. It is an opportunity to share experiences and learn from each other about ways to tackle issues. Issues that seem too big to tackle, or if we feel overwhelmed or unable to make a difference, are shared with others and they will be able to put forward different ideas or agree to set up new networks to share ideas to resolve issues together.
We face high workloads and many of us have personal commitments, it can feel very challenging trying to balance our work, trade union activities and personal lives. However, being online and trying to balance these is even more demanding without the added benefits of the collectivism, solidarity and good chats you can have at Congress.
We therefore, urge all members to come to Congress and in person, and to encourage their colleagues to do the same.
This year’s UCU election is a setback for all those wanting to see a fighting and more democratic union. The elections saw the right-wing and their new allies the Commons faction win a majority on the NEC. The elections saw one of the lowest turnouts in UCU national elections. We hope this analysis is useful and provides some initial next steps needed in order to resist the crises facing post-16 education.
The challenges
The Vice President position was won by Dyfrig Jones, who saw fit to publish an article in the THES during the election which called for quiet words in government ears and undermined calls for industrial action to defend jobs. The NEC and trustee elections were marred by red-baiting and the strategic pessimism of the right in terms of what members can achieve. This plays into the hands of a Starmer government that refuses to provide the necessary funding to the post-16 education sector and the far right who are pursuing a divisive ‘war on woke’.
The strengthening of the right and their allies will mean an emboldened resistance on the NEC to a UK-wide fight to defend jobs and pay across the sector. It will strengthen the GS’s attempts to impose depoliticised and localised battles to defend post-sixteen education. We can also expect hostility and reluctance to putting UCU at the forefront of international issues like Palestine and the fight to stop the growth of the far right.
Despite their pro-democracy rhetoric, the right will undermine the sovereign democratic decision-making bodies like sector conferences and congresses when votes don’t go their way. They will focus on plebiscites where members are atomised and the collective strength of our union is not leveraged. They will continue to falsely counterpose branch decisions to UK-wide ones to ensure that policies in support of UK-wide action are not implemented.
UCU Left doesn’t believe that we should be focusing on more cosy chats and partnership with Starmer’s Labour government, or providing excuses for its warfare not welfare spending policies.
It is clear that the failure of the GS and her team in HE to implement decisions regarding pay and refusal to launch UK – wide fight over jobs has left many activists frustrated and demoralised. This allowed the right to play on the concerns of those more passive within the union about our ability to prosecute an effective campaign that can win.
In FE a strategy of localised battles has led to a significant decrease in branches participating in any organised campaigning. In fact, for the first time in many years there are no FE branches taking action over pay or any other issue whatsoever.
It is in this context, that those putting forward a positive case for taking England-wide action over pay has taken place. The lack of strikes and campaigning in general has left a more passive union in FE. The pessimism of the UCU leadership about their inability to win members to England wide-action has badly weakened union organisation and a dwindling membership in the sector.
Members in FE are willing to fight – as shown by the example of a dozen or so branches which, in most cases, independently of regional offices, conducted indicative ballots and fought for a yes vote. In each case, members responded enthusiastically, with turnouts of 65% and more.
Members’ disenchantment with the union appears to have translated into a low turnout across both sectors in this election. UCU Left will be working to rebuild members’ engagement and provide strategies that build hope and confidence.
How to rebuild a union that fights for members
Winning seats on the NEC is important and it is a setback that the left fared poorly, albeit narrowly, in these elections. But this does not mean all is lost. We must and will continue to defend post-16 education collectively across FE and HE.
The key to achieving action that will be successful, make a difference to members’ lives and defend post 16 education is in branches building for UK-wide action.
In HE that means following the lead given by Newcastle, Dundee and Brunel. These examples demonstrate that when officers give a lead the membership responds brilliantly. The increases in memberships and record numbers of pickets in all these disputes shows the fighting spirit that exists to defend our universities.
But branches under attack must not be allowed to fight alone. We cannot stop 10,000 jobs disappearing from the sector by fighting university by university. Indeed this would defeat the very purpose of having a UK wide union – we need a UK-wide fight. This means inviting those on strike to your branches to speak, donating money to their strike funds and passing a motion demanding the union launch UK-wide action now.
FE, adult and prison education is in crisis. Further cuts in funding and a recruitment crisis means that localised action cannot succeed in pushing back further attacks.
The Further Education Committee met on Friday and passed motions calling for an indicative ballot of all members before the summer, and a motion to sector conference calling for UK action over pay, workload and national bargaining. Whilst there appears to be a change in mood amongst UCU HQ and the right on the FEC towards the ‘inevitability’ of England-wide action it did not stop them voting against motions calling to prepare for this.
Every branch needs to prepare for action over pay, workload and national bargaining by inviting striking HE staff to speak at your branch, organising lunch time protests and lobbies of your governing board.
The GS has agreed to implement congress policy and has called a UK-wide demo in defence of post 16 education on the 10th May. In every region there should be rallies in support of post 16 education with MPs, celebrities and strikers to highlight the crisis in HE, FE, Adult and Prison Education and to mobilise the UK-wide demo.
Article by Rhiannon Lockley, candidate for UCU Vice President, in Times Higher Eduction on 13 February 2025
Limiting industrial action to defensive branch battles on redundancy is not enough. We need to politically challenge the HE funding model, says Rhiannon Lockley.
UK higher education’s funding crisis has been developing for 15 years. When the coalition government introduced £9,000 fees for home undergraduates at English universities and cut block grants for teaching in 2012, it turned the economics of student recruitment upside down. Stable finances, planning and regulation were lost in a scramble for bums on seats.
This accelerated when student recruitment caps were abolished – partially in 2014, and then fully a year later. University managers realised that each home undergraduate earned them £2,000 more than they cost to teach, so they could make serious money via economies of scale. Thus began a splurge to invest in campuses, buildings and marketing departments.
But as the value of England’s regulated undergraduate fees fell in real terms – alongside that of the government grants that remained, in various forms, elsewhere in the UK – universities increasingly relied on the subsidy provided by unregulated, exploitative international fees.
It took only a decade for the system to go from boom to bust. Last year, vice-chancellors started announcing redundancies on a mass scale, reaching more than 10,000 in 2023-24. This year, the pace of announcements is only increasing. The scale of destruction hitting higher education is immense. The economic models behind UK higher education are imploding.
Clearly, members look to unions during times like these. Last May, members of the University and College Union voted at our UK higher education sector conference (our key higher education decision-making body) for a campaign to start building a UK-wide industrial response to the crisis.
Last December the UCU higher education committee voted to act on this resolution. Unfortunately, this decision hasn’t been implemented in a timely way to allow strategic action in advance of Labour taking decisions on higher education funding. Instead, we’ve seen repeated delegitimising of UCU members’ decisions.
We all get involved in unions to make a difference, and we won’t always agree on how to do that. This is why UCU strategy is led by conferences, to which all branches can send representatives and proposals. This gives everyone a hearing, making sure we assess different views fairly and take binding decisions together. Union democracy supports good decision-making. Sometimes union members are disappointed with those decisions, but we need to behave in a collegial fashion and respect democracy.
An ongoing approach of denouncing UK-wide action is not delivering sector security. Instead, the carnage is intensifying. UCU branches and the staff supporting them have shown huge resilience in local fights but members are being made redundant in droves.
If we understand that the UK’s various university funding models are all broken, dooming the sector to escalating decline until they are replaced, then there is an obvious problem with limiting industrial action to defensive branch battles on redundancy: the employer can wait out the branch.
To meaningfully act in the interests of members moving forward, UCU must do two things: escalate beyond branches being hit and politically challenge the funding model.
Even though the funding crisis is made in Westminster and the other national capitals, UK anti-union law stipulates that industrial activity must be tied to employment conditions. This means such a campaign has to be conducted over pay.
You don’t have to look far to see this in practice. After all, that’s what the National Education Union did in English schools, taking strike action on pay as part of a wider campaign for increased school funding. It’s also what our Unison colleagues in higher education are doing right now. UCU must not be misdirected into paralysis. Repeating the line that pay cuts save jobs just reinforces the logic leading the higher education sector to collapse; pay suppression and job cuts are both caused by failure to fund universities in a sustainable way.
If the UCU is united and confident, we can take on the challenges we face. At my branch, Birmingham City University (BCU), we’ve doubled our membership. BCU does not participate in national bargaining over pay and conditions, isolating us, but we’ve fought disputes on safety and pay, beating ballot turnout thresholds and establishing a BCU bargaining and negotiating body. Our members are engaged and ready to fight: they trust branch leaders. This comes from clear, consistent messaging on strategy, united leadership, and negotiators’ understanding of the importance of organised leverage.
It also comes from keeping members informed and in charge of decisions. I’ve used this approach at regional and UK level, winning me endorsements across the union for my commitment to building confidence through mutual respect and consensus. I strongly believe that for the UCU to respond credibly in the current crisis after a period of internal division, we need leaders who understand and will demonstrate commitment to a member-led approach.
I am standing for UCU vice-president, not because I have all the answers, but because I believe in our collective capacity to bring meaningful change. Democracy, integrity and unity are key to getting UK higher education through the storm.
The market system has set universities against each other in cut-throat competition. Our job as trade unionists is to resist division. We need to stand up and fight for the sector and for everyone who works and studies in it.
Rhiannon Lockley is a foundation year lecturer in the Faculty of Health, Education and Life Sciences at Birmingham City University, where she is UCU branch chair.
UCU Congress 2025 took place at a critical time as our sectors face a deepening crisis. In HE 10,000 jobs are set to go, and another 10,000 at risk next year. In Adult Education pay rises have lagged behind FE and face funding cuts of up to 6%. In FE chronic underfunding and pay that continually …
Liz Lawrence – Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Secretary This year UCU members and staff prepared for Congress in the context of a long-running dispute between UCU as an employer and the UCU staff union, UNITE. At Congress 2024 the employment sector conferences didn’t happen due to industrial action by UNITE. We recognise and support the right …
Christina Paine (London Met UCU, NEC) and Cecily Blyther (Petroc UCU), both members of the Anti-Casualisation Committee Across the UK, the post-16 education model is broken as workers struggle under the weight of precarious contracts, redundancies, casualised job losses and impossible workloads. As working conditions continue to race to the bottom we must secure the casualised …
Roddy Slorach (Imperial College UCU) and Christina Paine (London Met UCU and NEC) Keir Starmer’s government is in big trouble. Its strategy is already in tatters and its support is rapidly disappearing. Many voters are turning in desperation to the racists of Farage’s Reform UK. Labour’s answer is more scapegoating – of migrants, muslims and now …
Regi Pilling – Westminster Kingsway College and NEC Racists and the far right have grown in confidence in the US, across Europe and in the UK. Last year, fascist Tommy Robinson organised several large, racist demonstrations under the name “Uniting the Kingdom”, where speaker after speaker claimed Britain was “under attack” from multiculturalism, Muslims and the …
Juliana Ojinnaka – Chair, UCU BMSC “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” – Toni Morrison As an education union, we have a pressing responsibility to combat racism. Under normal circumstances, this obvious statement would not …
Bee Hughes, LJMU UCU and LGBT+ Members’ Standing Committee On April 16th a group of women stood drinking champagne outside the UK’s Supreme Court in celebration of a ruling on the legal definition of ‘woman’. Many of us felt disappointed, upset and furious at such a callous display. Many of us cannot fathom the lack of …
Anne Alexander, comms officer for Cambridge UCU and a member ofUniversity and College Workers for Palestine and BRICUP The past year has seen a significant escalation in repressive tactics by universities against protest for Palestine on UK campuses, mainly targeting students. Many UCU branches and activists have played an important role in building solidarity campaigns to …
Safia Flissi, ESOL Lecturer at South and City College Birmingham and NEC The government’s recent announcement of a 6% cut in Adult Skills Funding (ASF) is yet another slap in the face for FE, ACE and our learners. Without resistance it will undoubtedly lead to mass course closures; making education inaccessible for many adults particularly those …
Richard McEwan (New City College) and Regi Pilling (Westminster KingswayCollege), both NEC and national FE pay negotiators The Starmer government has signalled its intent to continue austerity, cutting adult education budgets and slashing welfare and disability payments relied on by many students and staff. The DofE is recommending a 2.8% pay award, but it’s unfunded meaning …
UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Thursday 12 December to consider what the union should do in the light of the financial crisis hitting our sector.
Tens of thousands of members face losing their jobs. Last year the union had no UK-wide campaign. Branches were left to fight alone. With the financial situation getting worse, and a limited window of opportunity to influence the Labour Government, we cannot afford to wait.
HEC voted for
a carefully structured ballot campaign over pay, to begin as soon as possible,
linked to a political campaign in defence of the sector,
on a timeline that would permit the union to call action before the end of the spring term.
Alongside the ballot and GTVO activity would be a campaign to raise the union’s emergency demands to save jobs, courses and our sector. It should include a conference to discuss the union’s demands. UCU has already agreed to focus on practical interventions that a Labour Government could make – to reinstate the block grant, for the government to cover or cancel the TPS contribution increase, and to reverse the hostile environment visa changes currently putting off overseas students from applying to university in the UK. We need to popularise these calls and debate them with politicians and ministers.
HEC also repeated the call made by Congress and the NEC for a major national demo to defend post-16 education.
We need to be imaginative and ambitious. In 2016-17, lobbying organised by The Convention for Higher Education, a loose coalition of UCU activists, academics and bodies including the Council for the Defence of British Universities, managed to force concessions from the Conservative Government in their Higher Education and Research Act.
The plan is for a joined-up strategy fighting for pay and jobs that can mobilise members to speak up about the crisis in Higher Education and put pressure on Labour to intervene. Our members are the best advocates for the sector. If this campaign develops successfully, we can also impact on Labour’s forthcoming HE funding review.
Branches facing redundancies and cuts were in the forefront of HEC’s minds. This strategy does two things: it brings our whole union together, and it puts pressure on Government to pay up for HE. If branches are fighting job losses they want to know that the whole union is behind them, and we all need to mobilise to insist Labour addresses the funding crisis of the sector.
HEC also voted to escalate procedures for branches facing redundancies to ballot for industrial action over jobs (see resolution 2 below).
The HEC meeting ended in messages of solidarity to branches facing job losses, and to UNITE UCU.
No-one should fight alone.
Resolutions from HEC meeting 12 December 2024 (including amendments)
1. Building industrial action ballot alongside a political campaign to defend HE
HEC notes the consultative ballot rejecting the pay offer and in favour of IA.
HEC resolves to
Immediately organise an IA ballot for a ‘fully-funded pay rise’ of 5.5% (2023-24 claim) linked to a political campaign for a fully-funded sector calling for emergency measures to save jobs, courses and the sector.
Run the IA ballot, HEC meetings etc., on a timeline permitting members to take UK-wide term-time strike action before the Easter break in most universities.
Recommend that the National Demonstration to Defend Post 16 education as decided at UCU Congress is called for a Saturday in February 2025 in order to support the ballot
Send out detailed briefing notes and organise regional GTVO workshops.
Call a conference to defend HE in early February promoting and debating UCU’s proposals. Organise regional lobbies and mass lobby of Parliament with the post-16 demonstration.
Consult members during the ballot on types of action through regional/devolved nations meetings and a branch delegate meeting during the ballot. Hold HEC in final week of ballot to plan action in anticipation of the result.
2. Responding to the Employers’ Offensive in the context of HE Crisis and Pay Dispute
This HEC notes
The HE employers’ offensive and the broken university funding model.
Long IA balloting-and-notification periods (TUA2016) and short windows for CR consultation (30 or 45 days, TULRCA1992) making timely ballot authorisation vital.
That branches should not have to fight on their own but that several branch that have taken or threatened industrial action have made gains or mitigated losses.
This HEC resolves to
Update branch officers weekly with a list of redundancy programmes by HEIs including VRs and CRs, and have a dedicated campaigning webpage.
Weekly anti-cuts meeting open to all branches.
Training on opposing redundancies via industrial action.
Hold a national demonstrations in early February in Wales, Scotland, England and NI and protests at MP’s surgeries in constituencies with threatened universities.
Shorten current ballot authorisation timelines, without requirement for consultative ballots.
Make every branch taking industrial action against redundancies a local dispute of national significance.
The large-scale redundancy programs and restructurings occurring in HE include a significant but varying silent redundancy of casualised workers across the sector. HEC resolves that the numbers of casualised work losses and ‘redundancies’ be added to the present count of redundancies to enable us to comprehensively assess the true scale of job losses across the sector and to inform our IA campaign with members.
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.
The UCU’s Higher Education Committee met on Friday 27 September to decide on next steps in the 2024 national pay and related claim.
We have reached the end of a series of formal negotiations over pay and pay-related elements. Most employers are already moving to impose the offer on pay in members’ pay, but some — perhaps as many as 20 — have told union branches they intend to ‘defer’ for 11 months.
In the immediate term, HEC voted overwhelmingly to keep the dispute over pay alive. There was a recognition that we have both a major opportunity — to put pressure on the new Labour Government — and a major threat — a spiral of sectoral decline — to address.
As we set out below, the best way to develop a campaign to defend our sector includes an industrial campaign over pay. A UK-wide pay campaign can mobilise our members against the ongoing Cost of Living crisis and demand UK-wide solutions that Higher Education urgently needs.
At the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) before the HEC, no delegate spoke in favour of the pay offer. Everyone knows that it is a pay cut, on top of the 11% cut in pay members suffered in two years previously. Staging the payment adds insult to injury. But there was doubt expressed by a number of delegates as to whether we could win more. All members, delegates and branches need a strategy to turn the situation around.
HEC voted to reject the pay offer and accept the pay-related elements of the offer. Some branches at the BDM reported that their members voted to reject the pay-related elements (terms of reference for negotiation over the other Three Fights) because the offer was too vague. But ‘acceptance’ simply means UCU agrees to go into negotiations in JNCHES over national policy recommendations. And it would mean that any industrial action and ballot would be specified in relation to the pay claim.
Such an ‘acceptance’ does not prevent branches fighting for best practice at a local level with specific local claims to employers. Nor would it stop the union campaigning publicly over casualisation abuses, chronic workload or discriminatory pay gaps.
Indeed, the strategy we attempt to set out below could provide a good platform to expose the current poor state of UK Higher Education working conditions.
The employers’ offensive
Over the last year, as many as a third of Vice Chancellors have asserted the need for cuts in jobs. We have seen a wave of major redundancy programmes across the sector. As well as creating suffering among our members in branches, the VC’s mantra of ‘affordability’ has cast a long shadow over negotiations at the top table.
Redundancy programmes and course closures are not new — ever since London Met’s infamous shrinking by two-thirds, numerous universities, including recently Roehampton, Wolverhampton and Goldsmiths have borne the brunt of horrific purges. But in previous years, major redundancy programmes were exceptional. Employers knew they risked undermining student recruitment in a ‘competitive marketplace’. Instead they mostly managed workforce numbers over time via means that avoided a public crisis, such as retirement, recruitment freezes and voluntary schemes.
Unfortunately in the face of this wave of redundancies, UCU’s approach has been to keep the fight local. Branches have been supported by the central union, but apart from independent rank-and-file initiatives there has been no attempt to bring the whole union together to fight them. Many members hear about redundancies, but in a piecemeal way. Their union is not mobilising them to offer solidarity. Even the Higher Education Committee has not been permitted to see a breakdown of redundancies branch-by-branch, despite HEC members asking for this information repeatedly.
There are two overarching factors as to why the last year has been marked by a redundancy wave. The first is the cumulative division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in market competition for students, worsening ever since 2010. Sooner or later the dam would break.
The second is the way our own union has reacted to the failure to meet the ballot threshold in Autumn 2023. Having botched the MAB by refusing to implement a summer reballot, and refusing to set up Conference-mandated strike committees to allow branches continuous reporting and control over the dispute, our union leadership effectively signaled defeat to the employers. Seeing their chance, Vice Chancellors rolled out their revenge across the country. The sector was now ‘in crisis’ despite universities sitting on billions in reserves.
We cannot continue like this. We have to say ‘enough’.
We need to discuss a serious strategy that can put meaningful pressure both on employers and the new Labour Government to change course.
We need to borrow from the successful NEU schoolteachers’ campaign for a ‘Fully Funded Pay Rise’, linking the fight over pay to the fight to defend the sector.
So how can we do that?
Building a new kind of dispute
We think UCU needs a joined up campaign, consisting of two elements: political campaign for a Fully-Funded Sector and an industrial campaign for a Fully-Funded Pay Rise. Many of the elements of this campaign are already policy, having been voted for by our Special Sector Conference in April.
This has to be a campaign that puts branches facing redundancies right at the centre. No branch and no members should be left behind.
Our inspiration should be the pay campaign run by the National Education Union (NEU). From the outset of their dispute, the NEU knew that schools in England and Wales would not be able to meet their pay demands. So they made that message part of their campaign.
They did not limit their demands to what the employers could afford. After all, a school with unbudgeted RAAC that turned the lights off after kids went home would not suddenly find cash for pay rises stashed away in a cupboard!
We need to take a leaf out of their book.
The public political campaign, which we suggest we could call For A Fully-Funded Sector, needs to be discussed and refined at branch, region and nation level, with initiatives taken up by all union bodies that can articulate both immediate and near-term demands to the new Labour Government. This would then be the backdrop for a ballot members over the national JNCHES claim (RPI+2% over pay).
HEC agreed to launch a consultative ballot as part of this campaign.
We need to urgently elaborate a strategy that all of our HE branches can get behind.
For a Fully-Funded Sector
The current home undergraduate tuition fee and loan system in England is unjust and unsustainable. Scottish universities have never had these high fees, and Northern Ireland and Wales had reduced fees. The falling real values of tuition fees, plus the competition for students built into the system, have cumulatively created the current crisis in the sector. Raising fees to £12,000+ a year, as Universities UK (UUK) wants, is socially regressive, unjust and politically divisive, will not address the ‘winners and losers’ problem, and could cause student enrolments to fall.
Recent reports that Bridget Phillipson is contemplating raising tuition fees to £10,500 a year shows that Labour is under pressure to do something. But it also shows that UUK are more influential than UCU right now.
In fact in the short term — without touching student fee levels — Labour can be called on to take three steps which together would begin to level the playing field in the sector. These were agreed by the Special HE Sector Conference earlier this year.
Cancel (or agree to pay) the TPS surcharge. These are extra costs the Treasury has imposed on TPS employers as a result of the most recent pension valuation. Schools and FE colleges are not required to pay this cost for at least a year. But Post-92 universities are shouldering an additional cost of between 3 and 5% of total salary. This partially explains why so many Post-92s have triggered redundancy programmes.
End the Hostile Environment, and ensure student visa routes are humane, affordable and rational. This means resurrecting post-study visas and visas for dependents. Labour should also abolish the migrant salary threshold for all. Right now universities outside of London cannot even internationally recruit postgraduate research assistants. Universities employ very large numbers of part-time teaching staff — none can be recruited internationally.
Bring back the ‘block grant’. This is a teaching grant to departments that was abolished for many disciplines (including all of Arts and Humanities) in 2010, and reduced heavily in others. We need to resurrect support for courses that have been denied historic levels of funding for years. This could be fixed at a student number cap, allowing the government to bring back caps on regulated student recruitment in stages.
These are all short-term demands. But none of them require tuition fees to rise.
Having cheer-led for £9k fees, the Vice Chancellors in Universities UK are now campaigning to raise even higher fees — to over £12k. But the demand to increase tuition fees is obviously unfair, and would be politically difficult for the Government. It is by no means clear that Labour will increase fees, but if they do, it won’t be enough for the VCs.
Although UUK envisage the tuition fee rise would be covered by the student loan, that would just mean that the student debt mountain would grow even faster than its current £20bn/year growth rate.
Student loans reached £236bn in March 2024. (Source: House of Commons Library.)
Paying universities directly via resurrecting block grants is simpler, focused and cheaper. It could also create some structural stability by financially underpinning departments previously reliant wholly on student recruitment.
The market system got us to the current crisis. The solution is not more of the same.
Winners, losers, and building unity
Raising home undergraduate tuition fees by £1,000 per student/year or so can ease finances slightly.
But it will escalate, rather than moderate, the market war-of-all-against-all that the sector was plunged into in 2014 when the Government allowed universities to make unlimited numbers of offers to home students (with the exception of Medicine). It will increase income to the universities with the most home students. And it will add to the loan every student will borrow and be expected to ultimately pay back — which may mean a further disincentive to working class undergraduates.
The employers’ approach is to set the national pay rate at a level the poorest university in the sector can afford. Then some universities may choose to make better offers to (some) staff. This process may be via permitted local negotiated arrangements (e.g. London Weighting or adjusted grade boundaries), one-off payments such as ‘Covid enhancements’, or, more individually, by promotion programmes and market supplements. Exceptionally it may be through universities exiting national negotiations.
The result is that what started as a ‘rate for the job’ national negotiation starts to become one of below-inflation offers followed by limited and selective local and personal negotiation. Collective bargaining, sector cohesion and principles of solidarity and equity between staff and union branches are undermined.
This process is working for the employers. Universities are spending ever-smaller proportions of their budgets on staff. In the 1970s, some research-based universities spent as much as two-thirds of their budgets on staff costs. 50 years later, and that figure has fallen to nearly half.
In their last-published release, the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that UK-wide staff costs had fallen to a record low of 50.8% of expenditure in 2022/23. The proportion is lowest in England (averaged across many universities) and greatest in Northern Ireland. Recent fluctuations aside (Covid and USS being likely factors), the tendency remains downward. The last sharp downturn between the 2021 to 2022-23 financial years coincides with the sharp rise in inflation (raising capital and operating costs) and below-inflation pay rises.
Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure 2014-23. Source: HESA.
Paradoxically, as universities have become more and more focused on mass teaching, and more and more labour intensive, they have tended to spend a smaller proportion of their budgets on staff.
UCU, and its forerunners Natfhe and AUT, has always argued that pay levels should be based on inflation and the cost of living, not on what individual universities claim is ‘affordable’. Indeed, once we concede that argument, we know we become the prisoners of Vice Chancellors’ financial gambles. Employers show us empty balance sheets: redundancies become inevitable, and colleagues are put in a zero-sum game over jobs and pay. That is why a local bargaining strategy like the General Secretary’s latest misnamed ‘Building to Win’ strategy is guaranteed to spiral to defeat.
We need to reset our campaign, and fight over pay in a different way, one that does not let the Government off the hook for the Higher Education crisis.
It’s why we need an combined industrial and political campaign that calls for a Fully-Funded Sector and a Fully-Funded Pay Rise.
Redundancies and the Other Three Fights
A campaign of the type described here can create the kind of broad-based public political platform would also allow the union to highlight the worst managerial behaviour we see in Higher Education.
We all know that market volatility drives employment volatility. Fighting for secure funding is crucial to take on the public argument about job insecurity and redundancies. So when we say we want a Fully-Funded Sector we can also say we want Secure Jobs and No Redundancies within it.
The same approach applies to Workloads and Pay Gaps. We can put our members at the forefront of this campaign. Our colleagues are by far the best spokespeople. They can say that they must have Time to Think! Or they can expose the reality for women, Black members, Disabled members and others who find themselves held back by structural barriers to progression.
This should be an opportunity to enable our members to lobby MPs and others, to give members a platform to speak up about the real conditions in our sector.
This approach also gives our members a platform over Pay. We can show that we are both committed to fighting low pay in the here and now, and to viable employment for the next generation of researchers, lecturers, and academic-related staff.
Industrial action for Fully-Funded Pay
But we can and must go one step further — we will need to take industrial action to highlight how far our pay has fallen. Mobilising the union onto the picket lines and streets is crucial to show the public and MPs that we are serious. Without that step, we risk being written off as just another lobby.
The action that we took in 2022-23 was extremely hard-hitting. But it was focused specifically on employers. That meant long periods of industrial action. A campaign that is focused both on the employers and government could look different. What it looks like is something we need to discuss as a union.
Most obviously, we could start with specific days which have an impact in Westminster or other national parliaments.
But the first key focus for activists is to put UCU in a position to signal to the Labour Government that UCU members are prepared to return to picket lines. In order to do that we need to win an industrial action ballot.
Right now, to implement this plan we will need to take some practical steps. Rushing straight out to an Industrial Action ballot without explaining the strategy in branches would be likely to fail to mobilise the 50% of membership required to win a ballot. Indeed, it would also be a huge missed opportunity. We have vast knowledge and expertise among our members. We should develop the plan in conjunction with branch officers and reps.
A consultative ballot is coming our way.
We should not roll out a consultative ballot alone. The ballot should be part of an urgent serious structured discussion in our union about how we can put across our union’s arguments and mobilise our members in speaking up for our sector.
There will likely be more Q&As organised centrally. Branches can invite HEC members and national negotiators to speak at branch meetings.
This is a chance for all members to discuss how we can build a proper grass-roots membership-driven campaign to defend our sector, our colleagues and our pay.
Our sector is at an historic juncture.
The market system is publicly failing. We must make sure neither staff nor students pay the price.
