Striking college lecturers should consider if they want to continue on this this self-destructive path

Students should not be made to suffer the fallout from persistent and protracted industrial disputes.

A pay agreement for college support staff was reached in June. Those staff now have a substantial pay rise in their pockets. However, a near two-year dispute with the EIS-FELA - a trade union for lecturers - remains unresolved. This is despite employers offering a pay increase worth an average of around £6,500 over four academic years. The impasse means lecturers continue to wait for a pay rise they should have received in September 2022.

Worse still, colleges now face the third major wave of industrial action since May 2023 after the EIS-FELA launched yet another boycotting of student results. Six new national strike days have also recently been announced, with the first of these scheduled for early next week. 

Lecturer walkouts at the start of the academic year are clearly designed to cause maximum disruption to the education of brand new college students, and the ongoing resulting boycott is already creating obstacles for existing learners who want to move on to employment or further study. In some cases, there will also be financial consequences. For example, first-year apprentices aged 21 or over could lose more than £5,000 in earnings if the resulting boycott continues until January 2025 and deprives them of grades required for entry to second year. 

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In the face of such risks, colleges and partner organisations are working tirelessly to protect learners from the impact of the EIS-FELA’s industrial action. Last year, this ensured the vast majority of individuals with missing results were still able to progress. However, with further industrial action now already under way, colleges and their partners may struggle to neutralise all of the harmful effects on students.  

Indeed, if the EIS-FELA continues to target the provision of learning and qualifications to students – the very reason that colleges exist - then the erosion of employer-trade union relationships will only accelerate. Such a deterioration would put national bargaining across the sector under even more pressure and could result in further industrial relations issues.

It should be remembered that colleges have no room for manoeuvre in pay talks with the EIS-FELA. Real-terms Scottish Government funding has fallen by 8.5% since 2021/22, with institutions facing an additional cash cut of £32.7 million under the 2024/25 Scottish Budget.

The stark reduction in funding for colleges means that more industrial action will not and cannot result in an improved pay offer from employers. Given this, the EIS-FELA needs to consider carefully whether it is truly willing to continue down a self-destructive path that could do lasting damage to the colleges which employ its members and the students its members teach. 

At the same time, college employers have repeatedly urged the trade union to accept the current four-year lecturer pay offer, which is fair and substantial. Proposals for a £5,000 pay increase over the first three years have already been overwhelmingly accepted by support staff unions and mirror the first three years of the EIS-FELA’s own four-year pay claim. 

An additional pay rise of 3% has also been tabled by employers for 2025/26, even though colleges have neither sight of their own budgets for that academic year nor knowledge of what the inflation rate will be.

We should also not forget that pay and conditions for Scotland’s college lecturers are already the best in the UK – and if the employers’ four-year offer is accepted, this advantage would be further cemented. Starting salaries would jump to more than £41,000 from September next year, with lecturers at the top of the unpromoted scale enjoying annual remuneration of nearly £50,000. In addition, the average college lecturer would, across the four-year pay period, be significantly better off with the employers’ offer than if their pay increases matched the Scottish Government’s public sector pay policy.

The present financial position of colleges means the EIS-FELA needs to be realistic and reasonable in its pay demands if we are ever going to resolve the current industrial dispute and put the college sector on a sound footing. Scotland’s colleges want to continue being excellent employers, but the first prerequisite for that is financial sustainability. And with ever-decreasing funding from government, and ever-increasing pay claims from the trade union, financial stability is in short supply at the moment.

Just as importantly, agreeing to a reasonable and fair pay award for lecturers would enable progress on the vital reforms needed to ensure that national collective bargaining in the college sector is fit for purpose. This effort should draw on the Scottish Government-commissioned Lessons Learned report, which was completed and shared with employers and trade unions more than two years ago. To date, work on implementing its recommendations has been far too slow and must now be urgently addressed for the sake of college students and staff who are facing disruption caused by continued industrial unrest.

We all want to ensure that learners carry on benefitting from the world-class education provided by Scotland’s colleges. It is, therefore, critically important that the EIS-FELA moves on from the current two-year deadlock over pay. The most obvious way out of the impasse is for the trade union to formally ballot its members on a pay offer that is considerable and at the very limits of affordability for colleges.

Gavin Donoghue is the Director of College Employers Scotland