EIS-FELA members in colleges across Scotland are about to be balloted for industrial action as the sector heads for its third national strike in less than three years. This is not a situation we relish, nor is it one that we could have anticipated back in March 2016 when we signed a road map to deliver harmonised national salary points and terms and conditions.

It took sustained industrial action in 2017 and the intervention of the cabinet secretary to force management to “honour the deal”, but progress has been made - by April 2019 lecturers across Scotland will have migrated to a national salary scale. Terms and conditions on some “big ticket” items such as class contact time, annual leave and transfer to permanence were also agreed in November 2017, with promises that “lessons would be learned” about national bargaining and industrial relations in the sector.

A year on, and it’s clear that no lessons have been learned by the Employers’ Association. A cost-of-living rise submitted back in December 2016 has been met with bluster but little meaningful negotiation. The EIS has tried repeatedly to entice management back to the table, most recently writing to them to ask them to make an offer which reflected the support staff settlement and public sector pay policy - a request met with stony silence. With management holding firm on a “final offer” that amounted to an average of less than 1 per cent a year for 2017, 2018 and 2019, we were left with no choice but to ballot our members, who overwhelmingly rejected the offer and voted to pursue industrial action.

‘Smearing’ lecturers

Management’s response has been to smear lecturers as greedy and ungrateful for the belated harmonisation uplift, ignoring the vast sums wasted on college mergers, the millions stashed into arms’ length foundations or the inflated salaries of senior managers. Incidentally, those senior managers are the only teaching staff in FE to have received a cost-of-living rise since 2016.

While some lecturers have had significant equal pay uplifts, they are in the minority (West Highland College languished at the bottom of the pay scales in 2016 at £26,000 a year, but employs less than 2 per cent of the sector’s workforce). Lecturers who gained significantly from equal pay had been systematically underpaid for decades - many others gained little or nothing from equal pay, and have seen their pay rapidly decline in real terms since 2016.

A fair pay settlement

Our demand is simple: management must negotiate now to deliver a fair pay settlement for lecturers. We want to negotiate an acceptable cost-of-living pay rise for all teaching staff, on the similar basis as support staff - in other words, a simple cost-of-living rise which is not linked to equal pay harmonisation. We want to move negotiations forward on a national set of T&C for lecturers, on teaching qualifications and professional registration for lecturers and a national policy on discipline and grievance. What we want, in short, is a national bargaining structure which delivers for the sector.

Lecturers are front and centre of Scotland’s college sector and the contribution it makes to the wider economy. Whether it’s delivering the Stem agenda, closing the attainment gap or providing routes into sustainable employment, colleges need to recruit teaching staff who are highly qualified and skilled in their vocational or academic area. In many high demand, skills-shortage areas, staff already take a pay cut to enter FE - doing so because they want to teach, to “give something back” and to develop the skills of the next generation.

We are in the public sector, too, and we deserve our pay rise!

Pam Currie is president of the EIS Further Education Lecturers’ Association (EIS-FELA)