As the only candidate for General Secretary from a post-92 institution, I bring particular knowledge of the issues facing a section of our membership that sometimes gets overlooked.
It’s now becoming clear that the marketisation of Higher Education is taking a serious toll on the ex-polytechnics and other new universities. With less research income and fewer overseas students, these institutions tend to rely much more than pre-92s on the domestic student fee, which has lost a third of its value since 2010.
Many of the most serious management attacks in the last few years have been in post-92s. Roehampton, Wolverhampton, East London, De Montfort, Winchester, Brighton, Oxford Brookes and others have all faced mass redundancies in the last couple of years.
The government has now widened the financial gap between pre- and post-92s by imposing a steep increase in the employers’ contribution to the Teachers Pension Scheme (amounting to 3-5% of the wage bill). On the pretext that universities are private corporations and not part of the public sector, they are refusing to provide additional funding to offset this cost — unlike schools and FE colleges.
On paper, post-92s have more protected staff terms and conditions than other sections of our membership. Unlike in the older universities, academic staff have the benefit of a national contract which stipulates annual and weekly maximum teaching hours. The provision of Research and Scholarly Activity (RSA) time for all lecturers defends against the possibility of teaching-only contracts, and the use of the lowest academic grade, Ac1 (Grade 6), is prohibited for teaching. But the proportion of time spent in front of a class tends to be higher (a maximum of 550 hours of teaching).
However, these protections are being eroded. At various institutions, teaching-only contracts have been introduced in certain areas. Managements have found ways to increase teaching loads by reducing RSA allocations and giving less relief from teaching for non-teaching responsibilities such as course leadership.
- Brighton University is currently threatening to bring in entirely new contracts for all its academic staff which would halve RSA time and scrap the weekly teaching contact maximum of 18 hours. At the same time they are threatening to introduce a teaching-only role at Ac1.
- At Sheffield Hallam University the employer is attempting to force through both a round of redundancies and attacks on the post-92 national contract and other employment rights. Specifically the employer is proposing the introduction of a teaching grade at AC6, in breach of the national framework agreement, reductions in pay protection periods and lifting of contractual maxima on teaching hours.
Behind these attacks on contracts and working conditions lies a strategy of downgrading the education on offer, and repositioning many post-92s as theory-light providers of technical, skills-based, vocational training. This is a betrayal of the promise of widening participation, reinforcing the notions that education is training for work and that academic subjects, particularly in the humanities, are ‘wasted’ on students from working class backgrounds. Yet for a generation, as John Holmwood from the Campaign for the Public University put it, post-92s have been ‘the heavy lifters of social mobility’, allowing working-class people to better themselves through higher education.
Post-92s have been too low on UCU’s agenda for too long. It is right that the union fought to defend the USS pension of pre-92 members. But despite motions from branches at HE Sector Conferences, there has been little effort to defend the post-92 contract despite it being an agreement at national level with the employers.
This needs to change. We need a campaign of support for our post-92 members, consisting of three prongs:
- We need a ‘Pay Up for TPS’ campaign to press the government to provide support for post-92s to manage the hike in pension contributions without cutting other budgets. If some post-92 managements are enlightened enough to join us in that campaign, so much the better.
- We need a vigorous national defence of the post-92 National Contract including industrial action where necessary. Members need to feel that this is one of the union’s priorities and that they won’t be left to fight at individual branch level when their management attempts to erode or rip up their contracts.
- We need to address the appalling state of governance in post-92 institutions. The Boards of Governors that run these institutions are often nepotistic clubs of local business people and third sector executives. Their dependence on Vice Chancellors means that they are incapable of exercising their formal role as the VC’s employers or holding the executive to account. Post-92s have no academic boards or senates to ensure that staff have a say. We need to fight for the democratisation of our universities to put staff and students in the driving seat.
I don’t just talk the talk. In 2019, my branch, Liverpool John Moores University UCU, fought back against attacks on the national contract. But we are a national union. We should not leave branches to fight these attacks alone.
For more on what I think the UCU General Secretary should be doing, please also see my manifesto.
Saira Weiner for UCU General Secretary 