Respect FE ballot results and next steps

Thousands of members across England voted and an incredible 91% of you indicated a willingness to take industrial action in pursuit of the campaign's demands. For details of your branch's results, please contact your local rep(s).

As the next step in our campaign, we are launching a petition to build support for our new charter for professional respect, before heading into negotiations with employers. 

Please sign the petition at this link.

I am asking you to not just sign but to get as many people as possible to sign the petition. This is a great way to take the campaign around your workplaces - especially to those members who didn't vote. Talk to colleagues about the campaign. Discuss their concerns and worries about pay and workload. Discuss how the ideas in the charter could help. 

Negotiations with the Association of Colleges (AoC) 

In addition to launching the petition, UCU has now submitted (alongside our partner unions NEU, Unison, GMB, and Unite the Union) our formal pay claim for 2022-3 to the Association of Colleges (AoC). You can read it here. 

The claim outlines our main demands: 

• a 10% increase on all pay points with a minimum uplift of £2000 
• all colleges to become accredited Foundation Living wage employers 
• significant movement towards meaningful national agreements to address workload in colleges. 

It is expected that negotiations with the AoC will commence in May.

Planning for statutory industrial action ballots this spring 

Colleges that achieved particularly high turnout in the indicative ballot will soon move towards statutory postal ballots for industrial action - the last step branches need to take before they can take industrial action in pursuit of a better deal.

The process for deciding which branches move to statutory ballots will be made by your elected officers on UCU's further education committee (FEC). 

I can't yet say exactly which branches will take part, but I can tell you now that based on the indicative ballot results there will be many more branches in a position to hold statutory ballots than there were after last year's indicative ballot. 

15 branches held statutory ballots last year and achieved improved offers on pay and other issues from their employer after getting strong results and in some cases taking action.

As long as members keep up the commitment to this campaign which you've shown so far, this year could see many more branches doing the same thing and making it our most successful FE campaign in years. 

I will be in touch in the coming weeks with more information about the next steps in this crucial campaign. 

In solidarity, 

Jo Grady
UCU general secretary