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Summary of key pledges

As General Secretary, I will:

  • ADVOCATE FOR POST-16 EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS AS ANCHOR INSTITUTIONS: Education institutions are a core part of the social and economic fabric of our society, but our employers and governments are not treating them this way. I will support the coordination of UCU branches in an area or city region to facilitate joint working initiatives with trades councils, other trade unions, devolved administrations, local authorities, and employers via good employment charter initiatives, to further our industrial aims.

  • REBUILD LINKS WITH POLICY MAKERS AND THE MEDIA: UCU should proactively shape the direction of policy initiatives that impact our members rather than via reactive dialogue with policy makers and campaigning. We will foster sustained dialogue on policy areas relevant to our members and build links with local, regional, devolved and UK government levels to maximise our chances of influencing policy decisions before they are made.

  • WIDEN ACCESS TO UCU’S POLITICAL ANALYSIS: through the expanded scope of the UCU Research Unit, to ensure branches, and regional and devolved national structures can access the detailed information they need to understand and engage with the developing political and policy landscape. (See Recruitment and Organising)

  • FORMALISE AND DEVELOP OUR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY WORK: Global conflicts and climate change mean that it has never been more important for trade unions across the world to support each other. I will work to reinvigorate our links with education unions internationally to create joint campaigns for collective action, as we all fight for our respective memberships and communities.

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Anchor Institutions: joint working and a Just Transition

We need to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the economic and life changing impact of our work is recognised and properly valued. Post-16 education has the power to transform lives and communities through training, education, and research, but also as major employers. Education workers equip students with the knowledge, skills, and creativity needed for our society to flourish.

Our workplaces are anchor institutions in every town and city and are integral to the type of community wealth building that can ensure a just transition to a green economy. The systematic erosion of our pay and conditions stretching back fifteen years continues to damage workers and communities, precisely because education is essential to local, regional, and national economic and cultural well-being.

In the city region of Greater Manchester, the Good Employment Charter recognises the significance of joint working initiatives between employers, trade unions, and local government. It sets out some core principles necessary to elevate employment standards – including decent pay, job security, access to flexible work, healthy workplaces, and employee engagement. An evaluation of responses from workers and managers in 2022 presents an overall positive impression of the difference made by the GEC, with clear interrelated recommendations for further improvements. Similar initiatives operate in the West of England, and in the Yorkshire combined authorities. We need to argue for progressive development and adoption of initiatives like these across our regions and nations. I will bring together a member-led political campaign to argue for the value of joint working between workers, learners, trade unions, local authorities and city regions, and devolved governments. This campaign will reflect the unique local contexts in which our branches exist.

A political campaign to recognise post-16 education institutions will require relationship building with trades councils and local employers, as well as politicians, think tanks and research groups. It will require that we fundamentally assert the need for a new funding model for Higher Education and massive investment in Further Education and Adult and Community Education, and in the provision of Prison Education. To do this well, our work will need to bring together our members across sectors to demonstrate and celebrate the significance of all forms of post-16 education, in training and re-skilling workers for a just transition, and for the transformational social and health benefits of accessible lifelong learning.

Influencing policy and building political relationships

The political and social contexts in which UCU and the education sector are embedded need to be understood from the local to the international level. We need to navigate the complexities in which our institutions exist to properly represent the interests of all our members across the post-16 sector.

Education and education workers have been the targets of relentless pressure from the Tory government. Over at least the last decade we have been subjected to a proliferation of increasingly hostile policies whose purpose seems to be to entrench division, stoke the Tory culture war and denigrate education institutions, workers, and trade unionists. These include: anti-trade union legislation (most recently Minimum Service Levels); curbs on the right to protest; the raft of hostile environment policies impacting migrant workers and refugees; the attacks on trans rights, attacks on Black Lives Matter and environmental activists; and the monitoring of social media accounts and other areas of our private lives. Core commitments to democracy and academic freedom that should characterise post-16 sector are being systematically undermined and often actively curtailed as evidenced by the recent singling out of two academics for criticism over their views on the conflict in Israel/Palestine by Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Against the backdrop of this broader political landscape, post-16 education workers face attacks on their disciplines, including significant threats to arts education at every level, constriction of funding under the Adult Education Budget, and cuts across wide swathes of degree programmes ranging from languages and archaeology to pure mathematics and chemistry. We must be prepared to challenge these cuts in the strongest of industrial terms.

Staff are obliged to engage with many and varied ranking and measurement exercises (the REF, TEF and Ofsted) which often have deeply negative impacts on productivity and staff, despite efforts to frame them as supportive. They are resource intensive, expensive, and divisive. These exercises and associated processes can be incredibly damaging to the morale of staff and students, and often have a deleterious effect on both the staff and student experience without contributing to the actual quality of education or research. The resultant brutal culture based on competition between institutions and workers significantly intensifies workload, tying up energy that would be better focused on delivering the highest quality teaching, training, and research that students deserve.

The Inquest into the tragic death by suicide of Ruth Perry following an Ofsted inspection laid bare the toxicity of this morally bankrupt assessment framework. I will be proactive as General Secretary about working with a broad coalition of UK education trade unions to challenge the Ofsted regime, which is actively placing staff at risk across schools, FE provision, and Prison Education. I will also approach other education unions to propose and develop forums to bring our members together more regularly to examine common issues and develop ideas for progressive education policy.

The interlinked research and organising approach I propose for UCU is well suited to collaborative work with other education unions. For example, I see a key opportunity to press Labour for further progressive policy ahead of the General Election, given the slight ‘de-marketisation’ and greater requirements for financial scrutiny and accountability associated with the reclassification of FE in England to the public sector.

Connecting with the wider movement

The trade union movement operates in an increasingly complex, hostile political context, making it vital to coordinate campaigns with political work for a just and sustainable education sector and society. As President (2020–22) I represented UCU on the Trade Union Coordinating Group, which coordinates campaigns in and beyond Parliament between eleven unions. Via TUCG I directly contributed to early drafts of the Decarbonisation and Economic Strategy Bill, and collaborated on our responses to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, wider environmental work, and Covid-19. As General Secretary I would seek to expand our reach via these groups and better integrate it with the wider policy work of our elected committees.

Our reach as a Union may differ according to the policy or framework in question. Sometimes explaining the potential consequences for members and ensuring support is offered in an effective and timely way is valuable, and enough. But sometimes we can and must be much more active, both in pushing back against particular policy initiatives and processes, and in making the case for progressive changes we need. I want to move us into proactive dialogue with policy makers, away from patterns of reactivity and lower impact. 

We also need to recognise that in some circumstances, we will be able to make the case that government policies are against the interests of our employers and ourselves. In these situations, we need to be able to engage and work constructively with them. This means moving beyond the “one note” adversarial quality of the current leadership’s media and social media approach. There is an important role for adversarial challenge and part of a General Secretary’s role is to strongly condemn bad government policy and bad employment practices. But this is not the only part of the public facing role of a General Secretary. We need to recognise that members’ interests are sometimes best served by a more constructive approach to industrial relations and the possibilities of joint working.

This destructive Tory administration is very likely to come to an end in 2024 or early 2025. With this transition, UCU needs a centrally coordinated plan to: rebuild relationships with policy makers and the media; effectively and proactively shape policies; wield influence with legislators; inform the media and the public. We need to return to the regular confident development of, and consistent advocacy for our own proposals for policy in areas including governance, research and teaching assessment, admissions policies, and quality assurance processes. We need to more actively build these relationships with the wider UK Labour Party across 2024 to advocate for post-16 education with most effect.

Our campaigning and member-led action needs to be designed and implemented with an eye to the realities of government structures, to maximise our chances of success. That said, UCU is the union for the people offering and developing the education, training, and research that are crucial for our transition to a green economy. We should be setting the agenda for reform of post-16 and the flourishing of every student, every research effort, and every worker in a humane and decent education system.

Formalising and developing our international solidarity work

UCU has a proud tradition of solidarity with education workers, trade unions and struggles for human rights and liberation across the globe. I would make our international work more accessible, and to make it easier for members to get involved. There are many UCU members engaged in discussion, collaboration and solidarity with our siblings struggling in the world’s two most populous countries – India and China – yet these are areas to which UCU, and the wider UK labour movement, tend to pay much less attention. That needs to change.

We need to develop stronger and deeper relationships of understanding with education workers and trade unions across the globe. We face global realities of climate change, conflict and increasing instability. Alongside crackdowns on freedom of expression regarding Israel and Palestine, assaults on democracy and the right to protest around the world mean there has never been a more crucial time for workers to come together and to campaign for our shared interests and concerns.

Unlike our sibling union the NEU, UCU offers few direct opportunities to connect and build international relationships with campaigns and workers. UCU does produce excellent analysis and reports regarding our international agenda, but much work is coordinated by a very small sub-group of the NEC and staff. This work is not often highlighted very widely so many members are unaware of excellent work our staff do with our partner unions via our European and global union federations, the European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) and Education International (EI). I want to change this.

I believe it is as important to communicate with members about UCU’s contributions to international policy development and campaigns inside and outside the UK. I will work with committees and staff to widen access to this work and reinvigorate our structures, policies and activities to further develop and maintain active links with unions around the world.

I have a strong personal record of working with international colleagues and trade unionists, and in advocating for UCU to develop consistency in our internationalism. UCU has strong policies in support of the right to self-determination, and for people to live in peace and respect. I have organised in support of the Kurdish people and for the safety and rights of people in Rojava, and successfully brought a motion for UCU to affiliate with the Freedom for Ocalan campaign through our NEC. I have joined several demonstrations against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I have joined demonstrations in London and Leeds calling for a desperately urgent immediate and full ceasefire in Gaza, in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Public demonstrations are important and powerful, but I believe there is more we can do as a UK trade union to build solidarity and links with trade unionists, educators, and human rights activists in connection with struggles for self-determination and against occupation. I believe we need to redouble our efforts to forge such links in Palestine, and to recognise and support those in Israel who oppose their government and campaign against the oppression of Palestinians. Recently two leaders of the Jewish and Palestinian organisation Standing Together visited the UK and met with the leadership of the Fire Brigades Union to discuss possibilities for supportive campaigning that links opposition to war, occupation, and racism to questions of economic and social justice. This is a practical and solidaristic approach I would like UCU members to be able to consider.

I am proud to have worked directly with Ukrainian colleagues and trade unionists to support education and humanitarian work there, and to co-organise with fellow founder members of the self-organised network UCU Members for Ukraine. We have launched a mailing list and run webinars in the absence of this active solidarity work being undertaken formally by UCU. In 2022, I joined an ETUCE mission to Romania and Moldova to meet with Ukrainian refugees and get a better insight into their living arrangements and education provision from school to higher education. I directly experienced the impact that UCU’s presence as a UK education trade union can make in this work and am certain that mutual exchange between education unions globally is fundamental to our cause and wider work.

Building on my track record of international engagement

I have also undertaken substantial work to support UCU’s international work in connection with education and workers’ struggles in Turkey, Rojava, Hong Kong, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, and Columbia. Being President during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic meant I travelled very little beyond two later trips, to Ireland and the Netherlands, but this experience cemented for me the power of using connective, less carbon-consuming ways to learn through connecting with people and campaigns, and to understand how we can make a difference in the global context.

Just as educational institutions are anchor institutions in their local communities, so UCU can play a role both bilaterally with sibling unions representing educational workers across the world, and multilaterally within Education International and ETUCE. Unions can play a positive role across Europe, both in repairing relationships undermined by the Tories’ Brexit and in collectively developing policies and campaigns across the European labour movement.

I will foster more dynamic engagement and mutual learning with international grassroots organising and solidarity campaigns. We should also be working with think tanks that have a global focus and research programmes that intersect with our interests, and especially in areas that transcend borders like democracy, workers’ rights, and climate policy. The expanded Research Unit (Recruitment and Organising) will provide members and branches with better information about the international political context and will enable more informed debate and policy development, giving UCU a stronger international voice.