It is well known that colleges avoid hiring staff on a permanent basis where possible - especially since Covid has threatened their cash flows. Sessional workers save a lot of money: no forking out on holiday pay or training costs. But sometimes offering a contract is unavoidable. This is usually when a course is well subscribed and a regular tutor is needed to guarantee that there is always a face in front of the students. 

However, even in this instance, there are tricks colleges can use to save cash. For instance, where a permanent contract might require hiring someone on a 0.5, for example, a college might hire them on a 0.4 and then ask them to perform duties above and beyond this on a sessional basis. It may claim that such extra duties are the domain of sessional staff and try to convince the newly contracted appointee that they are being offered an opportunity for extra teaching. Clever.  

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I was recently offered some sessional work by my college in addition to my part-time contracted work. However, since I am not a new appointee, I was fully aware that this same course had previously been taught by a contracted member of staff. This is part of a wider move to shed permanent teachers and replace them with more casual labour. According to plan, my manager tried to convince me that this was an “opportunity” to earn in addition to my existing salary and implied that I should in some way be flattered by this offer. Naturally, I saw it in a rather different light. 

Colleges want ‘expertise on the cheap’

The course in question had already seen a few sessional non-specialised teachers come and go, with predictably poor results. Materials had been ineffective, student satisfaction ratings low and no single teacher had survived teaching the whole module - with two going off sick during the course and a third used to carry it over the finish line...just. Even then the college refused to recognise that a permanent specialist was needed and instead chose to persist with its policy of using sessional staff. The idea of bringing me in as a permanent teacher to teach it on a sessional basis must have seemed like a masterstroke. Expertise on the cheap - the college manager’s ideal scenario.

The flat rate for teaching this 45-hour course was set at £33 per hour - and on top of those hours in the classroom this involved all preparation and marking. And this is the rub: once those other elements are factored in, you are teaching close to the minimum wage. 

According to guidelines from the University of California at Berkeley, a teacher should plan to spend two hours out-of-class for each hour in class for preparation and grading. And for a new class, the teacher should plan to spend four hours out-of-class for each hour of class. So, given that I am an experienced HE lecturer, the course would require at least 135 hours of my time. Subtracting tax and national insurance contributions - and assuming two hours for every one hour of teaching is even sufficient - I would be paid approximately £8 per hour. Apologies if this sounds a rather mercenary calculation, but please be assured that any such possible tendencies have not as yet tempted me to quit teaching to get a better-paid job in a supermarket.

The value of permanent teacher contracts

Next week I will have a meeting with my manager and will no doubt thank him for the “opportunity of teaching the proffered class - but no”. The sad thing is that the college will find someone to fill this gap and may even get lucky in its staff selection and find someone who will pull it off. But the chances are that it won’t. This is because it will probably hire a non-specialist who can be dispensed with once the 45 classroom hours are up. It is a circular situation that has been - and will get - played out repeatedly to the detriment of paying students. 

In terms of HE teaching within FE, the real coup is not just to find someone who will work cheaply but who will prepare a bank of quality materials to which the college can claim perpetual copyright. With these, the college is freed to bring in temporary staff who can teach off pre-designed slides (aka teaching by reading off PowerPoint) and then can claim it has fulfilled its obligations to paying students. 

Anyone signing up for this arrangement is really playing the mercenary game and ultimately helping to undermine subject specialists and de-professionalise the industry. The tragedy is that were the college to respect teachers and give permanent staff proper contracts, all of the chaos that I predict (and know from past experience will most likely occur) can be avoided. Ironic that some of the people who manage our colleges never seem to learn.

Rufus Reich is a pseudonym. The writer is a FE lecturer in England