Colleges have been in dispute for most of a decade

The goal was to give the sector some breathing room, strike a deal, and use the interim years to rebuild relations and begin working together on other issues that have spent years on the backburner.

That potential breathing space is being suffocated quickly.  Almost two years later, the dispute continues with little sign of concessions from either side. 

To understand how the current dispute has dragged on for so long, however, it needs to be situated in the context of a college sector which has been shaped and crippled by regular disputes for the past decade.

National discussions, national costs

Since unions launched an official dispute in May 2015 to defend their pay claim, there has been little respite and industrial relations have continued to deteriorate. The 2015 dispute was followed by industrial action before being resolved with a pay award in 2016.

The pause was short-lived, however. The Educational Institute of Scotland Further Education Lecturers’ Association (EIS-FELA), the union representing college lecturers, accused employers of reneging on their 2016 pay award and launched further industrial action in 2017, calling on employers to “honour the deal” of previous agreements.

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This was settled after national industrial action, and employers agreed to implement pay deals for 2015-16 and 2016-17.

The 2016-17 academic year was a defining one for college industrial relations. That year, College Employers Scotland (formerly the Employers’ Association) was established to represent the management side at the National Joint Negotiating Committee. 

It was also the year that national collective bargaining was implemented as promised by the SNP government. 

EIS-FELA members picketing during the honour the deal dispute in 2017 (Image: Kirsty Anderson)

The creation of national bargaining meant significant changes to how pay claims, disputes and industrial action were negotiated and settled by providing a forum to discuss national binding agreements over pay, terms and strategies for the sector.

But this required a critical, expensive first step to get off the ground: pay harmonisation. 

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Before national bargaining, college staff in comparable roles earned vastly different salaries depending on which college employed them. Some lecturers earned as much as £12,000 per year more than colleagues doing the same job on other campuses. 

At the time, harmonising pay led to salaries of up to £40,000 per year and 62 days of annual leave. A similar pay and job evaluation project was carried out for support staff.

In the end, Scottish Government reports show that harmonisation cost the government tens of millions (£34 million in 2018-19 alone). It also meant that the government would sometimes step in and foot the bill for decisions that resulted from national bargaining (at least £10 million in “collective bargaining costs” in 2019-20).

A timeline of college chaos

There have been 20 college disputes over the past 10 years. Some have involved lecturers, some involved support staff, or, recently, all staff. Most have been about pay, although some disputes were over terms. 

The 2021 dispute, when lecturers walked out over potential plans to replace lecturers with lower-paid instructor assessors on some campuses, stands out for a few reasons.

The 2021 instructor assessor dispute was launched against what EIS-Fela called “fire and rehire” plans to replace lecturers with lower-paid workers. 

But employers argued that this was happening locally, and not being carried out as part of a national policy decision. Therefore, it shouldn’t be the subject of national bargaining or a national dispute. Instead, it should be resolved at the relevant local colleges, particularly Forth Valley College. 

The dispute was eventually settled and Forth Valley reinstated the impacted lecturers. Still, it showed a crack in the bargaining process: much of the debate was characterised by a disagreement over technicalities and the validity of the dispute, with no recourse for a non-partisan ruling. 

This also meant that arguments over order watered down public debate about the personnel scheme's problematic implications.

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Although most disputes have been between EIS-FELA and the employers, support staff—roughly half of the college workforce—have also experienced conflict.

Each of the three main parties – the college employers, lecturers and support staff – have representatives who make up the National Joint Negotiating Committee for colleges. EIS-FELA is the only union representing lecturers, but the three support staff unions, Unite, GMB and Unison, are given weight in negotiations according to their membership. 

Of the seven major instances of industrial action since 2015, EIS-FELA has carried out five on their own and two with support union colleagues.

Unison has by far the largest membership of the three, which means that when there is disagreement, Unison's votes will always win out. In the current dispute, GMB and Unite have agreed to the employers’ pay offer but cannot receive it until Unison votes in favour.

The role of government

Since national bargaining was implemented, the government has intervened multiple times—at different stages and to different degrees—with funding to facilitate pay negotiations. 

This trend started with the government injecting tens of millions of pounds into the sector to help harmonise pay. 

Since then, however, government has vocally distanced itself from intervening in labour disputes in the education sector. Despite that public distance, however, the government has intervened with funding on multiple occasions. 

Perhaps the most prominent case of this in recent years happened in 2022. During the 2022-2023 school year, more than 55,000 teachers went on strike and closed schools nationwide. 

The dispute ended in December 2022 when local government employers and the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) – the umbrella union including EIS-FELA – agreed to a 14.6% pay raise over 28 months. It was a historic agreement that ended the first major teacher strike since the 1980s. 

From 2015 through to today, picket lines have been a mainstay on college campuses. Unions are beginning to turn their frustrations on the Scottish Government. (Image: Gordon Terris)

But the education sector learned of the true cost of that deal in May 2023, when the Scottish Government withdrew a planned £46 million investment in higher and further education. £26 million of that funding was initially meant for colleges.

When pressed on the reasons for the U-turn, SNP Minister for Further and Higher Education Graeme Day told MSPs that the withdrawal of the extra funding was “principally about the teachers’ pay settlement.”

He added that it should not have come as a surprise: the government, he said, had been clear that money for the teacher settlement would have to come from elsewhere in the education budget.

The government may have established a pattern of paying to end disputes at the last minute, but the current financial and political climate may have removed that option from the table. Inflation and government funding cuts have caused the college sector to operate with an almost £500 million cumulative funding gap over the past three years.

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In the past weeks, government ministers have been embroiled in increasingly complicated politics, from the termination of the Bute House Agreement to a no-confidence vote lodged against First Minister Humza Yousaf and, eventually, his resignation. 

The £26 million reduction in college funding is less than the more than £30 million that CES estimates it will cost to match the unions’ current pay claim and end the current dispute.

Concerns are mounting that the national bargaining structure isn't up to resolving disputes in good time. And the other primary exit ramp, emergency funding from the Scottish Government, appears to have closed.