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Summary of key pledges

As General Secretary, I will:

  • BACK MEMBERS IN EVERY DISPUTE by doing everything in my power to organise to win. I will work with all relevant committees, staff and negotiators to make sure communications about our strategy and options are clear to members at every stage.

  • ORGANISE TO SECURE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING through coordination of our organising at local level to build industrial power and drive our sectoral claims, within a coherent central UCU political and organising strategy.

  • RESPECT, EQUIP, AND SUPPORT NEGOTIATORS with timely information and analysis, renewed structures, and communication channels to connect them with members so they can deliberate and formulate tactics to win. I will reinstate and update bargaining advisory and support structures for branches to safeguard minimum standards at local level.

  • LEARN FROM AND AMPLIFY LOCAL WINS by allocating resources to understand and record what worked and why in each context and using that information to draw out general principles and tactical ideas that could be adapted to assist other branches in dispute.

  • ENSURE BETTER SUPPORT FOR BRANCH COMMITTEES both during disputes and in the daily work of representing members. This will include clear lines of contact to receive appropriate and timely support for issues at branch and sector level, and clear channels for branches to represent their members in decision-making in all disputes.

  • DEVELOP A REPOSITORY OF BRANCH EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE that branches can access to support every aspect of their work. This long-term project will include developing union-wide networks and resources within, and to complement UCU Organising Hubs.

  • PUSH FOR BETTER TRADE UNION REPRESENTATION in decision-making and governance structures that affect the working lives of our members, for example: on further education college governance boards and university councils and senates; funding bodies; research councils: and equality initiatives.

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Using every lever to win

The model of post-16 education in the UK is broken. Government underfunding cannot excuse employers’ mismanagement. Winning requires UCU to respond with a coherent industrial and political strategy. Every action undertaken and campaign pursued by members must be effective in furthering our aims, across all levels from branch to devolved nation to UK level.

I have used this section to outline what is needed for UCU to make better decisions about industrial strategy. As General Secretary I will facilitate creating a coherent strategy to which every member and branch can fully contribute.

Where members are in dispute with employers, I will back them with everything I have.

I have a long track record of hard work as a lay member and lay President in UCU. While the role of GS differs importantly, the motivations I have will remain the same: I want UCU to be a union led by members, for members to win in workplaces across post-16 education. A General Secretary has a duty to respect and uphold union democracy and ultimately, to drive forward the implementation of members’ collective decisions.

Members in dispute need to have confidence that a range of strategy and tactical options will be comprehensively explored before decisions are made by sector committees or votes at formal branch meetings. To enable members and elected representatives to be able to meaningfully consider options, I will ensure that they receive detailed and accurate legal and political information about industrial strategies, and risks to consider, in advance.

To win, our members need clarity in our aims in every campaign and dispute, and for us to forge constructive and productive paths through disagreement on strategy and tactics. I will never sidestep our democratic structures, instead my focus will be to build trust and improve how we work together. (See: Democracy and Decision-making) 

Organise to secure collective bargaining

Collective bargaining in practice only has partial coverage in higher and further education. This means significant portions of our bargaining have to be pursued locally. Rather than accept this direction of travel we need to frame our strategy as ‘defend and extend’ collective sectoral bargaining agreements at sectoral and national levels (for example the post 92 HE contract) and improve conditions for our members through coordinated local bargaining that reinforces our collective objectives.

It is a mistake to view and conduct local bargaining as a substitute for sector level bargaining, or to see these mechanisms as in opposition. We demand a set of core standards that every employer should observe as a minimum. This is both reasonable and fundamental to the long-term health of education. As we fight for sectoral standards, we need to focus on securing real improvements in the workplace through all means open to us: the more wins we accrue locally, the more we increase pressure on other employers to follow suit.

I will encourage branches to coordinate local campaigns to win for their members and build the leverage and momentum we need to secure effective collective sectoral bargaining agreements and arrangements. New UCU Organising Hubs will help branches to collaborate on similar campaigns at the same time, the sharing of best practice, and collaboration between higher and further education branches. (See Recruitment and Organising)

Respecting negotiators, ensuring they have the necessary tools and support

In order to get the best they can for members, negotiators at every level of UCU need responsive support and the ability to review and analyse information quickly, as well as the ability to make recommendations via the appropriate democratic channels. I am a current branch negotiator at the University of Leeds, and I led UK HE negotiations in the pay and conditions (Four Fights) and USS disputes as UK Vice President in 2019/20, so I understand first-hand how invaluable good support structures and communication are, and how much hard graft elected lay negotiators put in on behalf of members. I will prioritise UCU assistance for negotiators elected at sector or national level to negotiate facility time / release.

I will respect the democratic duty of negotiators to pursue wins based on member-led policy positions. Where appropriate, as GS I will participate in negotiations, attend briefings and debriefings with the elected lay negotiation team and abide by collective responsibility. I will ensure appropriate space and support (including access to hybrid meeting technology) for negotiation teams to deliberate strategy and tactical options, recognising these discussions are often conducted under intense pressure. It is important that we develop mechanisms for negotiators to access timely expertise across UCU’s membership and engage with members across communities and job types to better understand members’ experiences. Importantly, I will ensure negotiators have access to appropriate channels to exercise their democratic responsibility to report to members they represent.

Support for local negotiations

In recent years, branch committees have reported a lack of sustained support when negotiating locally and when taking part in sector disputes. To reverse this trend, I will restore central support for branches in local negotiations, to safeguard basic standards for local agreements. The Further Education Ratification Panel does this job in FE, and I will examine how its reach can be extended, to rebuild collective standards across the sector. Elections to the Higher Education Ratification Panel (RatPan) have not been called for several years, exposing branches to employers who want to ignore the standards set in the Framework Agreement. This agreement should be the basic minimum for the sector and its details matter. Through elected committees and UCU Organising Hubs, I will also instigate work to ensure the update and regular review of branch checklists and core standards for local deals. Operating in this connected way will help us avoid any ‘race to the bottom’ tactic from employers and will boost branches’ leverage in negotiations. This attention to detail will make a notable difference.

Learn from and amplify local wins

Branches engaged in successful organising across UCU find it surprisingly difficult to share their experiences through formal channels. Sometimes member communications or press communications highlight selected wins, but opportunities to build momentum more widely are routinely missed, with no space made to share practical details or answer dynamic questions. It should be the norm that gains and wins obtained by UCU branches are solidified into learning points for other branches and for our elected industrial committees at sector and national levels.

I will ensure that we use our regional committees and the network of UCU Organising Hubs (Recruitment and Organising) to share and celebrate branch wins, and to stitch them into the fabric of our organising. This will be achieved by allocating resources and time to help a branch communicate how leverage was identified and exploited, and to explore learning points about what worked and why – and how did branches determine what was not working early enough to pivot away from those tactics? By routinely interrogating these questions we can create innovative strategies for bargaining and campaigns at all levels of UCU.

In light of recently established policy from the annual HE and FE sector conferences based on learning from locally successful tactics during industrial action, I will initiate work to develop recommendations for the establishment of strike committees designed to increase democratic participation in industrial action, without limiting our union’s ability to build and exercise maximal leverage.

Better support for branch committees

Our industrial strategy cannot be separated from how we organise and build our branches. In recent years there has been significant confusion about the role branches are expected to play in decisions about industrial strategy. As a former UK officer, I am also aware of frustrations at some branches about difficulties in accessing information about UCU’s local industrial action procedures and delays in responses to requests for approval of industrial action plans, or what information is required in the application.

I will engage with branch committees to ensure UCU understands what they need and what is helpful or unhelpful in dispute-related processes. I will ensure branch committees regularly receive the information and materials they need in advance of key decision-making moments about collective disputes at sector level. I will also establish a clear route to raise questions and provide information or intelligence about employer behaviour that is relevant to the dispute or campaign at hand.

We have mechanisms to inform decision-making during disputes that need to function alongside Sector Conferences: Branch Delegate Meetings and Branch Briefings. Restoring these requires serious work, so branch delegates can make fully informed decisions in a democratic manner. I will ensure that members receive the full information they need in clear communications, and that decisions are respected and implemented.

Making the changes I describe in Democracy and Decision-making and Recruitment and Organising will facilitate earlier and more regular engagement between UCU’s central teams and branches. This engagement is essential to better support branch committees and officers in leading nuanced local discussions that consider the benefits and drawbacks of any course of action. It will enable branch committees and officers to lead local discussions and will make it easier for branch officers to raise specific queries and requests.

Formulating effective branch claims, building good strategies

Returning to a democratically informed industrial strategy means ensuring UCU can engage effectively with members from branch through to sector level and at all stages of a dispute, including the process of formulating claims on which it rests. It means improving our decision-making structures, and the information we provide through them in good time, so they are timely and fit for purpose during high stakes action. (See Democracy and Decision-making)

Effective strategy means understanding where we have leverage and where trends are evolving. To do that, we need to map jobs and contract types as well as conditions across our membership. It also requires having good information about our employer(s). UCU’s ability to support branches with detailed employer profiles has seriously diminished due to the disappearance of the longstanding UCU Bargaining Information System. This system gave branches detailed information about their employers which meant branches often knew their employers’ operations and workforce data better than they did. Equipped with that information, branches could set the agenda in local bargaining, and UCU was able to build the strategy that saved defined benefit pensions in 2018.

By resourcing the expanded research provision and Organising Hubs described in Recruitment and Organising I will reinstate and update the UCU Bargaining information System, helping negotiators and branches to ensure a solid basis to local claims, and to the development of our sectoral and national claims. Based on reliable data, we will be better able to develop our industrial strategy to win by discovering the effect of withdrawing our labour, at different times and in different ways, to ensure that our industrial action has maximum impact.

This approach will also support UCU in embedding climate demands into our bargaining agenda. As a founding member and co-chair of the Climate and Ecological Emergency Committee, I know that progressive work on Green New Deal claims in some branches must be replicated and coordinated at scale across our union, and at sector level.

Developing a bank of branch experience and expertise

Some member-led networks have demonstrated the power of collaboration between branches, for example via branch twinning to support getting the vote out in recent HE ballots. After University of Liverpool UCU defeated compulsory redundancies in 2021, they shared their tactics and strategy through informal networks. Their methods helped to sustain the Marking and Assessment Boycott in many branches in 2022, forcing employers to give ground, despite the fragmentation of an all-branch strategy.

To make sure we keep hold of, and can develop and share lessons learned across UCU branches, I will develop union-wide networks and trial real-time and asynchronous modes of mutual learning, to reinforce work emerging from UCU Organising Hubs. I reiterate my commitment to finding the best way to reinstate and update the UCU activist (email) list which facilitated significant mutual peer support across UCU and was unhelpfully withdrawn in 2023.

Governance: a call for workplace democracy

Workers should have direct representation on all governance structures and decision-making bodies making decisions that affect their working lives. These structures include college governance boards; research councils; funding bodies; equality initiatives such as Athena Swan, Disability Positive, the Race Equality Charter Mark, and more. This form of representation is a great source of industrial strength because workers should be part of making the decisions. We need to reverse the erosion of staff representation in the governance structures of our institutions.

In the past, UCU Scotland has campaigned on reform of governance and was instrumental in developing the Higher Education (Scotland) Act (2016), which moved Scottish universities towards a more democratic model of governance. We can use this structure as a model and seek to extend this approach to the whole UK and to all of the sectors we represent.

I believe that the representation on governing bodies is a lever UCU has not pressed hard enough thus far. We should ensure that the voices of the people doing the work are also central to decision making in our workplaces. We must campaign for workplace democracy, challenging the removal of elected positions on University Councils; pushing for UCU representation on Governing Bodies in further education; lobbying funding bodies to stipulate significantly improved minimum standards for research contracts and to recognise PGRs as staff, on proper salaried pay.