Duncan Moore, UCU National Executive Committee member, Further Education, personal capacity
The University and College Union (UCU) national Further Education Committee (FEC) met on 16 April to discuss the financial situation in further education, following the Labour government’s failure to deliver any solution to the massive funding crisis.
Last year Keir Starmer pledged that improving further education would be the “defining mission” of his government and promised to “inject hundreds of millions more into the sector.” The post-16 education white paper promised “significant investment in per-pupil funding”.
Last month, the Department for Education confirmed that the national funding rate for 16 and 17-year-old learners will only rise by 0.5% in the academic year 2026-27, from £5,105 to £5,133. Per-student funding remains 8% lower than before 2010-11 in real terms.
Student numbers have gone up. There are around 32,000 current students in colleges who will now be unfunded. This comes on top of Labour’s 6% cut to the Adult Skills Fund.
College principals will certainly try to pass the costs on to staff, through real-terms cuts to pay and increased workloads.
The FEC also discussed the Ministry of Justice’s recent restrictions to prison education funding. Over 300 prison teachers have been made redundant, around 10% of the workforce, jeopardising rehabilitation and risking increasing the rate of reoffending.
The FEC considered motions submitted by branches to this year’s Further Education Sector Conference. Some are calling for a pause on industrial action, to focus on building branches, and to defer decisions about a national aggregate ballot to a special sector conference in 2027. This follows this year’s disaggregated (branch-by-branch) strike ballots that did not bring significant numbers of branches into dispute. However, the overall vote for action was overwhelming, and had those branches been balloted on an aggregate basis, the turnout would have been over 50%, and 80 colleges could have participated in the strike.
Other motions are calling for the union to begin making preparations now for an aggregate ballot in 2026-27. Socialist Party members have argued on the FEC for action in the next academic year, although the FEC majority opposed it. We will be supporting motions for UCU to begin an aggregate ballot in the next academic year. The crisis in workloads, staff retention and low pay is not waiting, and our union shouldn’t wait either.
