Tag: student fees

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HEC REPORT 30TH April 2021

HEC discussion focused on negotiations on pay campaigns and pensions. Whilst confidentiality prevents much discussion, it is possible to say the following.

Pay

On pay the 0% non-offer in 2020-21 has been repeatedly rejected by UCU members in electronic ballots and in branch delegates meetings. On the 2021-22 pay negotiations employers continue to put forward plans for further pay cuts. A wide-ranging debate took place on how to address this crisis. A late motion to HE Sector Conference from an independent member was supported by UCU Left and was carried. This called for an immediate campaign and further delegate meetings to be held. The forthcoming HESC will be the crucial democratic body to determine UCU strategy and policy in relation to any forthcoming dispute.

USS Pensions

Members will be aware that the USS negotiations have not led to a settlement on benefits. Instead a dispute over the 2020 valuation is fast approaching. There is agreement at HEC that the valuation is incapable of producing an outcome which protects the Defined Benefit scheme. This leaves members with a Hobson’s choice between remaining the high cost scheme and baring most of the risk or opting out of the scheme and having no pension to retire on. A wide ranging debate on how to address this. The forthcoming HESC will again be the crucial democratic body that determines UCU strategy in relation to, an almost certain, forthcoming dispute.

Motions

An important motion to instigate greylisting and increase solidarity with the 165 members threatened with redundancy at Leicester University was carried nem con.

A motion, subsequently discussed on Twitter, about student number controls was lost on a tied vote: 13:13 with 7 abstentions. The motion on student number controls had been tabled for a previous HEC but was withdrawn by the proposer so was not moved, debated or voted on.  On this occasion the convention with tied votes is that the status quo remains, so there is no change to existing policy. The motion is pasted below.  The debate centred on the role of caps on student numbers in pre- and post 92 universities. The lifting of the cap on student numbers has led to larger universities, particularly within the Russell Group, to boost their fee income by increasing their student intake. At the same time many post-92 universities have faced increased competition for students.

Opposition to this motion did not centre on the impact of the lifting of these caps, but on campaigning for ending marketisation and the fees regime. The role that fees has played in the increase in student recruitment was emphasised.

Numbers entering higher education have been rising and will continue to do so in the face of rapidly rising unemployment. Youth unemployment rate is now over 14%, a 10% rise during the pandemic, and there are still five million workers on furlough. Higher Education is an important option for current students and those returning to education in the face of the crisis Covid-19 has created. As a union we should not support a view which holds that there is too much higher education in the UK.  There is a definite need for further discussion on this but the motion as it stood was not fit for purpose. It conceded too much ground to the notion that the problem is too many students, rather than the marketised fees regime.

UCU policy is for the abolition of fees and access to university for all those wishing to seek a university education. This unites us with students in a demand to challenge the market in higher education. To suggest students’ choices themselves are somehow responsible for the funding crisis in some institutions is to break the link of solidarity we should be building with student groups and student unions.

A further argument was made by supporters of the motion that these increases in student numbers are the driver of casualisation, especially in Russell Group institutions. Again, there was opposition to the notion that we can solve casualisation by cutting student numbers. In the summer of 2020, as the pandemic accelerated, Universities were only too willing to dismiss casualised staff on mass when fearing a drop in student numbers.

As a trade union it is our member’s strength and mobilisation through campaigning and industrial action that protects jobs and improves conditions. Granting employers and government uncritical control over the future of the sector by managing decline is not a solution for members. UCU must campaign for post-92 universities but it must be one which is independent of the employers’ narrative of a shrinking pool of students. As the mover of the motion’s own research recognised “the return of caps … may not necessarily be the silver bullet that we are hoping for” (https://medium.com/ussbriefs/stockpiling-students-covid-19-caps-and-growth-inequalities-in-uk-he-from-2014-5-to-2018-9-f9ab2991cc2e\0.

  1. Student Number Controls (redux)

    HEC notes that:
  2. the combination of Covid-19 and marketisation of HE has created a ‘perfect storm’ of adverse conditions
  3. some UK universities over-recruited in 2020, and expect to do the same in 2021, in effect ‘poaching’ from other universities, particularly post-92 institutions

HEC believes that:

  1. The current uncapped, ‘free-for-all’ system of student places provides undue advantages to highly ranked institutions, and rewards gaming the system
  2. Fair competition is neither possible nor desirable, and that attempts to induce an education ‘marketplace’ have done enormous harm to the sector, workers and students

HEC resolves to:

  1. request modelling of student number control mechanisms for UK HE to be reported to the next HEC for further action
  2. support a robust form of student number controls aligned with UCU’s general opposition to the marketisation of HE
  3. campaign for caps aimed at the prevention of institutional failure and departmental closure
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Get organised to Get the Vote Out

Build the ballot over pay, equality, workload and casualisation

Get the vote out flyer

UCU has called a five-week ballot for industrial action over pay this term. It opens on Tuesday 15 January and closes on Friday 22 February. It is timed for the maximum duration while still allowing members to take hard-hitting strike action this term and hit exams next term. So if we win the ballot we can take serious action.

We need to get organised.

First and foremost, this ballot is an organising challenge for every branch. Thanks to the Tory anti-union Trade Union Act, more than 50% of members eligible to vote must participate. Even if 100% vote YES, if only 49% vote, the vote does not count.

The main reason members do not vote is simply that they forget. Paper ballot envelopes and forms are put aside and forgotten about. We have to set up the type of grassroots organisation that makes sure that everyone is asked to vote, encouraged and reminded right up to the deadline.

We know that when we get this right, we get a high turnout.

We know how to do this, but we are all shockingly busy. We know workload – one of the key demands of the campaign – is ridiculous in our sector.

We must make a conscious effort to get organised. We have to treat the organisation of getting the vote out with exactly the same seriousness and care as when we organised the strike over pensions last year, and when we fought local campaigns over redundancies in the past.

The evidence shows it can be done, but we have to make a decisive shift to get the turnout.This is the second ballot we have had over the same pay round.

In the Autumn, the overall turnout was 42%. It was a ‘disaggregated’ ballot: each branch was counted separately. 7 institutions got over 50% turnout. One branch, Herriot-Watt, got a 64% turnout, many of the big branches got between 40 and 50%. The votes for strikes and ASOS were overwhelming, but they could not be actioned.

What we need to do

Every branch needs to

  • call organising meetings to kick off the ballot;
  • then organise a series of meetings in departments and buildings to explain the issues, and encourage debate;
  • organise members to systematically remind colleagues in each department, just as we would if organising a picket line rota.

The 50% threshold is a deliberate anti-democratic burden, designed to prevent unions from striking even when votes in favour are overwhelming.

But it is also a challenge to every member. What is the point of voting if your vote is wasted? The message has to be

Step 1: vote yourself, and Step 2: ask your colleagues to vote. Generations fought for the right to vote. Don’t let passivity undermine democracy.

We need to set up action committees to carry this out. We cannot leave it to a few branch reps. Every member has a stake in this fight.

This is a political fight as well as an organisational challenge. In the autumn, the high YES votes indicate members were convinced by the arguments.

  • Pay. Our pay has been cut by at least 15% since 2008. UCU’s latest figures put the drop by as much as 21%. Every teaching assistant struggling to get by, every teaching fellow on a part -time contract, every researcher on fixed funding stuck near the bottom of the pay spine, each one is 15-20% poorer than they would have been a decade ago. Cuts in the rate for the job mean everyone is devalued. The pay offer of 2% this year is still a pay cut. Members in USS branches can expect their pay cut further.
  • Inequality. One result of low pay is that staff try to increase their pay by other means. We are seeing more individual bargaining and consequentially greater pay inequality. Individual bargaining (threatening to move and demanding a pay rise or moving and negotiating) tends to favour white male staff over women and BAME staff, and increases gender and ethnicity pay gaps. The shocking stories published by the BBC last week are a symptom of this.
  • Workload and casualisation. High workload and low pay are two sides of the same coin. The employers have used the fear factor of redundancies and casualisation to force up workload in our sector. If we do not fight to secure the casualised, the employers will casualise the secure. As the USS dispute showed, strike action allows us to push back against the workload tide we all struggle with. This ballot helps us put the issue on the map and demand action to cut excessive workload or increase paid hours.

New arguments

But the situation has developed in two important respects. What follows is a sketch of the new arguments we are likely to face, and some suggested counter-arguments to make. In USS branches, a strong YES vote also puts us in the best position to ballot over USS cuts.

Objection 1. Brexit

The argument goes something like this.

The future of the UK, and UK universities, is uncertain because of Brexit. Universities don’t know what will happen to student recruitment. We don’t even know whether UK universities will be able to bid for EU research funds, or if they can, on what basis. Now is the wrong time to fight. We should ‘wait and see’.

This is a perfectly understandable argument, but the conclusions are wrong. Instead of waiting, we need a big YES vote to give the union and members a voice. A strong YES vote with a high turnout gives the union the mandate with the employers and government to be taken seriously. It puts the union in a position to negotiate with the employers over pay and jobs precisely at the time when the employers may be looking for job cuts and pay cuts to pay for the mess they have got themselves into.

We can decide what we do with that mandate once we have it. But first we have to get the votes.

The USS dispute taught members two important lessons: we have power when we strike and hit lessons and threaten exams, and – with a credible threat of strike action – ‘impossible’ demands become possible. In the middle of the strike, the Chinese Embassy relayed a threat from the PRC Government to Universities UK: if strikes hit exams, Chinese students will not come to the UK next year.

Crucially, we need to put the universities on the political radar as a sector to be strategically defended in the aftermath of Brexit.

This means members standing up to be counted, voting YES in large numbers and taking action to defend themselves and the sector. A strong strike/ASOS vote over pay is the best protection against threats to jobs. A well-organised Get the Vote Out operation can be repeated for a local ballot over redundancies. Brighton University had a strong GTVO campaign over redundancies. Despite being a post-92, they got over 50% turnout in the autumn.

Objection 2. The HE funding ‘crisis’

If one crisis were not bad enough, the Tories are flirting with the idea of creating another. Whereas the Brexit timetable appears to be outside their control, this ‘crisis’ is entirely of their making.

As we know, in 2011 the ConDem government jacked up undergraduate ‘home’ university fees from £6,500 (£3,000 paid by the student) to up to £9,000 per student. The universities charged the maximum, £9,000. At the same time, the Government set up a complex new loan system covering fees and maintenance grants, and partially abolished the block grant payable to each department.

The Government racked up a mountain of debt to pay for these loans, which the Treasury projected as £90bn by 2021, of which only half will probably be repaid. This is the first – and by far the largest – debt crisis, one they have mainly kept secret.

Meanwhile, in 2014 the Government took the next step in the ‘Willets Plan’ and abolished limits on student numbers (except for a small number of subjects like medicine).

These changes created a situation where universities realised they might make vast amounts of money by expanding in competition with other universities. The new motto of the sector, including of the posh universities, was ‘Pile ’em high and teach ’em cheap’.

Competition creates winners and losers, and the winners gambled in a building and borrowing boom. Universities that reckoned they could grow have borrowed huge sums. According to the Times newspaper, the sector has £10.8bn in debts. UCL tripled their undergraduate recruitment and are building a new campus in East London, where they will be joined by the University of the Arts. Both are borrowing hundreds of millions of pounds.

Meanwhile, other universities, particularly those traditionally recruiting working class or mature students (post-92s, Open and Birkbeck), are seeing student numbers fall. High fees and the opening of spaces in ‘big name’ colleges is hitting them first. The HE funding crisis started at colleges like London Met, and spread across post-92. It is now hitting pre-92 universities through restructuring and redundancies. The employers want to pass the risk and cuts on to staff, as the USS pension fight shows.

No-one is immune.

But the Tories are considering turning a chronic crisis into an acute one. They are leaking proposals from the Augur review of Higher Education funding they commissioned last year. This report seems likely to propose a cut in undergraduate ‘home’ tuition fees to £6,500 at exactly the same time as new EU students are reclassified as ‘overseas’.

Behind the scenes the universities are frantically lobbying the Government to stop the cut unless the Government makes good the difference. At least three prominent Tory ex-ministers have now spoken out publicly. There is no particular need for the Tories to press this button now. But it is a stark reminder that we have battles ahead.

We must not misunderstand the weakness on the Government side. Macho talk from the ‘Office for Students’ that ‘no university is too big to fail’ misses the obvious point that if even one small university closes, several thousands of students will be out on the street with debts and no degree – and the OfS has no Plan B. A spate of college and course closures triggered by Government incompetence would create a massive political crisis. US scandals like Corinthian Colleges and Trump University will be a tea party by comparison.

What does this mean for our ballot? Just like the arguments about Brexit, we have to argue that if we don’t fight, we will lose. A strong YES vote puts us in the best possible position to defend pay and resist job cuts, whether they be triggered by Brexit uncertainty, university restructuring or college closures. It also emphasises the point we made throughout previous strikes on every issue: we ask students to defend staff on strike, because through our strikes, staff are defending Higher Education.

The splits in the Tories show that we have everything to fight for.

In conclusion

The truth is that the collective ability of staff to shape the direction of Higher Education ultimately depends on our ability to win industrial action ballots.

We need to get organised. The stakes could not be higher.

Every member, every activist and every rep must be mobilised.

We have five weeks to defend our sector and win the turnout we need.