Scottish college lecturers are striking over pay today but the education secretary John Swinney has told MSPs their demands are ‘unreasonable’.

The pay harmonisation process in the college sector in Scotland has led to an average 9 per cent pay increase to lecturers over three years, according to the Scottish government.

However,  Members of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) Further Education Lecturers’ Association (FELA) are out on strike today because they say their employers - Colleges Scotland - have failed to offer them “a fair cost of living pay rise”.

Writing for Tes today EIS-FELA president Pam Currie said that lecturers have had no cost of living pay rise since April 2016, and the final offer from employers, Colleges Scotland, amounted to a consolidated rise of less than 1 per cent per year - an offer that was overwhelmingly rejected by lecturers in October 2018.

However, when Mr Swinney was asked by Scottish Labour’s education spokesman Iain Gray, at today’s meeting of the Scottish parliament’s education and skills committee, if he thought it was reasonable for college staff “to expect a cost of living increase over and above the harmonisation change, similar to other workers in the public sector”, Mr Swinney said: “I think a reasonable objective is to secure a cost of living increase that is affordable in the sector and I don’t think it’s reasonable to discount the effect of pay harmonisation in the process. No, I don’t.”

Mr Gray then asked if Mr Swinney, therefore, thought the cost of living rise should be reduced for college lecturers because some had benefited from “the entirely separate national bargaining”.

Mr Swinney replied: “I don’t think it is defensible to separate harmonisation and cost of living as two separate things.”