Education

UNISON Higher Education Members fighting cuts to pay

December 2, 2021

Socialist Alternative UNISON activists, University of Brighton
Back to school: fight to make our classrooms Covid safe

September 6, 2021

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Student Socialist Alternative

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UPCOMING EVENTS

UNISON Higher Education Members fighting cuts to pay

Members of UNISON at two universities – Brighton and SOAS, will be joining UCU members taking strike action over pay, in the first few days of December.

Members were balloted over the question of strike action after the August 2020 pay freeze, which was imposed on all university workers three months into the pandemic, when Vice Chancellors were worried about a financial crisis across the whole sector. A year later, universities haven’t collapsed due to a lack of students, but they have faced massive financial issues, with real terms income (now overwhelmingly from tuition fees) falling year after year, just like our pay settlements.

Vice Chancellors, in the style of thousands of local councillors, have held down our wages (but not their own) to deal with funding cuts. They are all under pressure to prioritise spending on shiny new buildings and facilities, to engage in an undignified fight with each other over new student enrolments. Lecturers, administrators, technicians, caretakers and cleaners are all expected to do more for less, with “student experience” and league table places given priority over staff welfare and well-being.

UNISON’s ballots, run on a disaggregate basis and coming much later than they should have done, after branches had to be individually asked if they wanted to be involved (!), produced legal strike mandates (i.e. a 50%+ turnout) at four university branches. This was, of course, disappointing and says a lot about the level of confidence and belief across activists and members that UNISON will lead a sustained fightback, which we all know is necessary. Members need to be confident that branches are able to lead strikes and that these will have the backing of UNISON’s machinery. Timely, well-resourced, well-organised and enthusiastic ballot campaigns are crucial, and all activists need to be able to run these successfully, as long as the anti-trade union laws remain in place.

Those four branches are now using their local ballot mandate to put claims over pay in the form of one-off bonuses for all members. This would in-part, make up for the pay freeze of 2020 and the pitiful increase made in 2021 – well below inflation then and now.

At Brighton, we’re striking for one day on Thursday 2^nd December, the middle day of UCU’s three day pay and pension strikes. We’re demanding that the University make us a serious offer and at least recognise that continual years of real-terms pay cuts will not be tolerated by union branches where the leadership reflects the anger of members.

As the new left leadership of UNISON’s NEC starts to make a difference to the direction of our union, despite wrecking attempts from elements of the previous conservative and risk averse leadership, we’re confident that branches such as ours can play a small part in leading the way to a generalised fightback of public sector workers into 2022.

Our strike comes days before the ballot opens over this year’s pay claim (almost matching the timescale of the much larger local government ballot) and also a separate ballot over attacks on the USS pension scheme. It says a lot about what needs to change within UNISON, that UCU will have taken three days of action over the issue before our ballot papers even go out to members.

After years in which our members watched our union leadership do very little to resist pay cuts and workload issues, we’re starting to fight back. Uniting all workers, public and private, in a determined campaign for pay and pension justice will be the priority for 2022 for all trade unionists.
Back to school: fight to make our classrooms Covid safe

For many, the relaxation of the government’s Covid safety guidelines on 16 August was met with a mixture of relief and trepidation. There was relief that we could once again meet with loved ones, go out with friends, and return to some semblance of normality. But there was also trepidation that the government had gone too far and too fast in junking safety measures. And with schools now set to reopen across England, Wales and Northern Ireland (schools in Scotland have already been back for two weeks), education workers like myself are all too familiar with this troubling dissonance. In fact, thanks to the ‘Leicester Fortnight’, Students and education workers in my area were back to school in the week beginning 23 August… and I can already say that many of my concerns have been borne out.

Last Tuesday, the Guardian published a short article which interviewed six teachers about how they felt about returning to school. The views differed, of course, but the majority expressed serious concerns about workplace safety. One teacher stated: “I couldn’t believe it when students were told they no longer had to wear masks. The whole system is a farce. I’d be very surprised if this is a school year that is ‘normal’ again. Too many [Covid] cases, too few measures.” The report from a teacher at a school in Scotland, which like in Leicester has already returned, is prescient: “Nearly 200 pupils [in his school] are already off due to Covid”. Indeed, Scotland has seen a surge of covid cases over the last two weeks, for now stabilising at around 6,000 daily infections – the highest ever – even though many restrictions remain in place!

School outbreaks

Part of the problem with managing covid in our schools has to do with years of underinvestment in education infrastructure, as well as the pernicious role of privatisation (academisation). But it also has to do with the way that covid cases have been identified up until now. Current research around the Covid virus is that transmission takes place mainly via airborne particles. This means that the small, oversubscribed classrooms, typical of the UK state schooling system, have acted as effective breeding grounds for the virus. This was clearly understood by education stewards and workers in the earlier stages of the pandemic and was consistently affirmed by medical professionals. The Department for Education’s (DfE) recent (and inadequate) decision to spend £25million on 300,000 CO2 monitors to alert staff and students if CO2 levels rise, meaning that fresh air is failing to circulate, is a recognition of this. The fact that they have failed to complete even these minor adjustments before schools have returned demonstrates a cavalier attitude toward the wellbeing of education workers and children.

However, it is a reality which many local authorities and school leaders continue to deny. Gripped by a surging second wave, back in March this year Martin Samuels, Leicester city council’s strategic director of social care and education, persistently took to the press to deny that schools could be vectors of transmission, instead blaming parents for irresponsible behaviour at the school gates. On 31 July, the Times ran an article headlined ‘Study shows schools do not spread Covid’ (based on the following research: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01826-x).

The evidence for such assertions is the ostensibly small number of ‘outbreaks’ we have previously seen in schools. But this evidence is based on flawed testing guidelines. Before the government guidelines were updated on Monday August 16, staff and students exposed to a positive case were required to self-isolate without getting a PCR test. The consequence of this has been to obfuscate any outbreaks in schools, making it appear like all infections were coming from the community. With testing now becoming more widely used (in order to keep staff and students in schools), we may yet see dramatic evidence of mass school outbreaks.

Tory cowardice

The government is now fully committed to avoiding any further lockdowns come what may (‘let the bodies pile high’, Boris Johnson said) — and they have done this in the most cowardly fashion possible… by passing responsibility for safety measures onto anyone but themselves. As a BBC report states: “In many ways, the responsibility has been handed over to head teachers to decide what common-sense measures are needed.” Some school leaders will decide to keep some of the safety measures, such as one-way systems and limitations on mixing. Some school leaders, no doubt seeing rumblings from below, are taking a tougher approach than that suggested by the government. Others may see this as an opportunity to return to normal. But most likely, school leaders will look to Local Authorities and Public Health England (PHE) for guidance. This is the case in Leicester where the Local Authority has issued a series of guidelines for schools and PHE continues to work closely with all involved.

But workers cannot rely on Local Authorities or quangos like PHE to look after their interests – it is critical that education unions step in to fill this vacuum with policies that foreground the safety and wellbeing of staff and students. Of course, fears about the tremendous educational and social damage done by confining children to their home for long periods of time are real. No one wants to return to another lockdown, least of all education workers. But if we are to avoid further damaging restrictions, it is imperative that any steps toward lifting safety measures are careful and not rushed. By contrast, in areas where schools have already reopened, the approach has been complete chaos. This unfortunate situation has been allowed to develop because, so far, the unions have failed to intervene with a sufficiently bold approach. Appeals by education union leaders for the government to see sense are not enough. Words need to be backed by action to force their hand and to enable organised workers to take control over safety measures.

Safety is not the only problem either. Concerns about workload also need to be urgently addressed. As one education worker in the Wirral explained, “I feel tired just thinking about returning to work.” She continues: “Some of the usual demands of the job were minimised due to covid restrictions, such as fewer long reports to write; now they will be reinstated along with covid considerations.” Many education workers have also found that since teaching remotely there are now fewer boundaries between work and life, with parents more frequently in contact. All of this with no pay-rise!?

Who is still at risk?

The vaccine is a huge benefit to us all, but it is not a silver bullet. The main risks may not now be covid deaths (although this remains a serious concern) or even the dreaded ‘long covid’, but the NHS being completely overwhelmed by covid related admissions, and people being denied critical care because of a lack of capacity. We have already seen multiple Trusts announce ‘Opel 4’ Black Alerts, meaning that hospitals are “unable to deliver comprehensive care” and patient safety is at risk, over recent months. Typically, Black Alerts – which to be clear should never happen, let alone become the norm as they have under the Tories – are most associated with the darkest months of Winter. Spiralling infection rates in our schools could severely exacerbate this crisis, especially when flu season begins.

Too often, the health and wellbeing of education workers and students is discussed as if it is somehow separate from that of NHS workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The NHS is the biggest employer in the country. It is made up of the parents, the siblings, the relatives and the friends of education workers and students. We all depend on it when we are unwell. When the NHS is in crisis it hurts all of us. So, when we talk about protecting the health and wellbeing NHS workers, we are simultaneously talking about the conditions of education workers and students. They are bound together by so many threads. The fight for safety in our schools is also, therefore, a fight for the future of our NHS! This is just one of the reasons why it is so important to get the school reopening right and why it is so troubling that the government, once again, are about to get it so wrong!

We say:
- Make school safe – for democratic control by education workers, students and communities over the measures necessary to keep classrooms Covid safe
- Trade union action now – the leadership of the main education unions, including NEU and Unison, need to step up and back up strong words with well-organised and coordinated action by workers
- Invest in our schools and stop the cuts – let’s put an end to crammed classrooms and properly support the Covid generation
- No to academisation and privatisation – bring all schools back under local-authority control now
Image: AugusteBlanqui, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Covid students shut out of university – fight for education for all

After the #ALevels2021Strike won teacher assessed grades earlier this year, many universities are offering fewer places, despite A-Level students exceeding the minimum grade requirements. For example, Liverpool University made only 43 offers for their dentistry course and deferred 30, compared to 142 offers and 152 deferred last year.

Last year the Tory government tried to force through a grading system based on a discriminatory algorithm that marked down students from schools with historically lower grades (That is: overwhelmingly more working-class schools and schools with higher proportion of students from BAME backgrounds). This would have prevented students from achieving the best grades simply due to going to school in a deprived area. However this merely formalised what was already a reality in our racist, anti-working class education system. More working-class schools were marked down by the algorithm because capitalism already maintains a cycle of inequality, assuring marginalised students generally achieve worse grades (with a few exceptions). This is just one way in which the myth of meritocracy does not live up to reality.

Educational inequalities exacerbated

Obviously, the pandemic has been very disruptive for students studying for their A-Levels and this has not been felt evenly. As always it is working-class students, especially those from BAME backgrounds that have been hit hardest. This is not only because different schools and colleges have been affected to different extents, but also because of other factors such as cramped or noisy studying conditions at home, while wealthier families could afford private tutors to minimise the impact of schools closing. This will worsen the grade gap that inherently disadvantages working class and BAME students under capitalism.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) report from September 2020 found that the pandemic is worsening educational inequalities, while schools for deprived students had already been subject to the largest decline in funding per pupil. It predicted that up to this year, schools in poorer areas will see their funding increase by between 3 and 4 percent less than those in richer areas. Funding for schools in England fell by 9% in real terms over the last decade, and sixth forms have been the worst affected by these attacks, which have had their funding cut by a quarter.

The Tories were forced to abandon this algorithm, due to widespread anger and mass mobilisation of students; however, this poor handling by the government led to chaos as universities that had made offers based on the old grade suddenly had many more students meet the grade requirements. Faced with the opportunity to rake in more money from students’ rent and loan payments, universities happily followed up on the offers. Campuses already have more students than was expected, while many more places have already been deferred from last year.

Underfunding

This is following decades of underfunding and a deliberate policy by university management to squeeze in as many students as possible onto campuses for financial reasons, without investing in the necessary wider infrastructure. This means that over capacity universities are unable to deal with the influx of new students, while living, studying and working conditions suffer for students and staff. University managements’ disastrous handling of the covid pandemic has further exposed how they prioritise extracting the most possible in fees and rent over students’ education, living conditions and even safety. The clearest example of this has been exposed through the Student Rent Strike Movement. After students had been promised normal face-to-face teaching to bring them to university accommodation, heavy restrictions were imposed leaving many students isolated in cramped housing without an option to refund their tenancy contracts. The brilliant rent strike against this has won concessions at many universities.

Now that universities have felt the effect of their overcrowding on universities in the name of profit, they have switched to a hyper-cautious approach, amid fears of “inflated” grades. Professor Richard Harvey, academic director of admissions at the University of East Anglia (UEA), as quoted in the Telegraph, states that most schools have “at least one” student with good predicted grades that applied to 5 universities but received no offers. A factor in this is strict limits placed on certain courses such as medicine. At a time when the already underfunded National Health Service is under increased pressure, it is absurd that universities are being made to turn away “very well qualified students”, when we should be increasing the number of healthcare professionals being trained. In healthcare, as in education and all other sectors, the capitalists and their governments put profit before public services. Even the limited measures currently proposed to support healthcare courses would only come at the expense of cuts to other courses – as we have explained previously.

Build the fightback

Students and staff throughout the education sector should fight for proper funding so that all universities can provide a high level education to students, not just a few of the most prestigious institutions. This is necessary to end the two tier system where working class students are funnelled into universities where their hard work is rewarded with an under-valued degree, while the top universities are predominantly restricted to more advantaged students. University funding should be fought for alongside proper funding for vocational education and other alternatives to university. Together with democratic control of students, teachers and support staff, this will assure institutions provide a high level of education and break free from the logic of profit and marketisation.

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