Inside the years-long pay row risking the futures of working-class students

‘A lot of further education lecturers can’t pay the bills’

The current pay dispute for FE lecturers in Scotland started in December 2022, when College Employers Scotland (CES), the national body for colleges as employers, tabled a 2% annual salary increase offer. That month, inflation was sitting at over 13%. EIS-FELA rejected the offer.

After 18 months of negotiations, the offer from CES now sits at £5,000 over three years. This represents an 11.5% pay increase for most lecturing staff in the sector by the end of the three-year period. But it will be a real-terms pay cut, says EIS-FELA, since prices have already risen by more than 10.4% since negotiations began. FE lecturers’ pay increases would also lag behind other groups of public sector workers – including police officers, firefighters, NHS workers and school teachers.  

Gavin Donoghue, director of CES, says colleges are “determined to reach a lecturer pay settlement that is fair and affordable, and which supports our staff as we emerge from the cost of living crisis”. But, he adds, the sector is facing “exceptionally difficult and deteriorating financial circumstances, with an 8.5% real-terms cut in government funding since 2021/22 and a further cash cut of £32.7 million in the Scottish government’s budget for 2024/25”.

“Employers cannot afford to go beyond it,” he says.

Dixon remains unimpressed. “A lot of us can’t pay the bills,” she explains. “I’ve got three jobs, I work in here full time, so 35 hours during the day. Then I do a night class. I’ve had to take on private work, I also do SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) marking and I’m still not able to pay the bills.”

As industrial action has ramped up, her employers’ union-busting tactics have got more aggressive, she says. In response to EIS-FELA’s ‘resulting boycott’ (in which lecturers agree to continue teaching, marking and completing the rest of their work but refuse to enter students’ results into the official systems), some colleges have started ‘deeming’ staff pay – withholding up to 100% of salaries from staff taking industrial action short of strike.

“It is scary,” admits Dixon. “It’s meant to be scary. I’ve had a few sleepless nights, but we’ll get through it because they need to find a solution. We need to get back into work, doing our job teaching the students.”

CES defends the decision of colleges to deem staff pay, saying they are “unashamedly seeking to protect the interests of their students”. While results information is still being gathered for this year’s students, the impact of EIS-FELA’s resulting boycott is understood to be significant.

Some students say they ‘support the striking lecturers 100%’

Ryan Donachie is one of the students whose education has been hit by the strikes. “We’ve lost a significant number of teaching hours,” he says. “But I am fully clear on where I stand. I
support the lecturers 100%. My lecturers and the support staff in the college have supported me through some incredibly difficult times.”

He returned to education at Glasgow Kelvin College this year as a mature student, after having to leave his job in the ambulance service following a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. This year he has been studying a pathways course in humanities with the view to continuing into a degree course. Donachie plans to continue fighting for FE.

“I come from a working-class background. I’m disabled. I would never have been able to go back to education and on to university if I didn’t go through college,” he says. “Colleges genuinely are a significant route out of poverty for many people in Scotland. They’re also great for widening access to education.”

Like Donachie, Sher Khalid-Ali didn’t think she would ever have the chance to go back to education after leaving school at 15 with no qualifications. “I was unemployed for a long time,” she says. “My life did a 180 when I went back to education.”

Khalid-Ali finished an access course at New College Lanarkshire in June last year, but her final course marks were not registered by her lecturers, so she feared she may miss out on her university place. She was staunch in her support for the strike action. “None of them want to be taking this action. Obviously they are striking for pay, but they’re also striking against massive cuts to contact time and courses.”

An agreement was finally reached whereby universities accepted partial marks from some students, and Khalid-Ali is now studying social sciences at University of Stirling. She continues to be active with Student Action, a group set up to support FE lecturers.

“This matters so much to me because it literally saved my life – and I’m not a one off,” she explains. “Of the girls that went to uni from my class – you’re talking single parents, people who have had mental health issues, ex-drug addicts. These are people whose lives have been completely changed, and that’s just one class in one college. So when you imagine the actual impact of colleges on the wider community, it’s just incredible to me that they’re so under-appreciated and so under-funded.”

Scottish colleges have now finished for the summer, so the picket lines will pack up for a while. EIS-FELA members are being balloted over a pay offer that would add a 3% pay increase to the fourth year of the “full and final” CES offer. For now, the fight goes on.

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