Money was found to end colleges dispute... but from where?

“Members cannot come to this chamber and rattle off a list of demands… without in any way identifying how they would be funded. That is reckless.”

So said Graeme Dey MSP, Minister for Higher and Further Education, on the 30th of April, 2024. He was speaking in response to Labour education spokesperson Pam Duncan-Glancy, who had asked when he would step in to “sort out the mess that he has left colleges in”.

A few minutes earlier, Mr Dey had said that MSPs are “perfectly entitled to advance the argument that we should spend more money on colleges” but that they have to “tell us where that money will come from”.

He had previously said that providing more funding for colleges would mean cutting funding for schools or hospitals. “That,” he said, “is the stark choice that everyone has to face.”

Mr Dey’s position is pretty clear: asking the government to spend more money on colleges without being able to say where the money will come from is unacceptable. Indeed, it is “reckless”.

So you can imagine my surprise when that same Mr Dey appeared in front of the Scottish Parliament’s education committee and couldn’t tell them where he is getting the money he found to end the college dispute.

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For nearly two years, lecturers engaged in ongoing and escalating industrial action in order to secure an improved pay offer from Scotland’s colleges. Strikes caused major disruption to learning, and a resulting boycott (in which assessments were still carried out, but the outcomes were not entered into college systems) led to threats to deduct 100 percent of pay from participating staff.

For much of that time, both the unions and college employers effectively said the same thing, even if they wouldn’t say it together and at the same time: the government had not provided colleges with enough money to reach an agreement with staff.

But it didn’t matter, because Mr Dey said, again and again, that the government could not intervene in the dispute and that, even if it wanted to, there was no more money for them to put on the table. Indeed, the minister said this to me, on the record, on camera, just a few short weeks ago. Jump to about the 2 minute mark in this video if you want to see that.

And then he intervened by putting more money on the table. £4.5 million of it, to be exact, and on a recurring basis. This is, we’re told, a “relatively small amount of money.”

It worked. The lecturers’ union recommended members accept the offer, which they did, bringing an end to a dispute that had gone on for so long that I was still a college lecturer when it started! Importantly, both sides said that the agreement had only been possible because the government intervened and offered more cash – something that Mr Dey subsequently described as “a price well worth paying”.

But when he was asked where it was coming from, he couldn’t say, because apparently he doesn’t yet know. The government, it turns out, are “still actively looking at where [they] will fund that one.”

Committee members were, unsurprisingly, concerned by this response.

It seems that we are simply to accept the “assurance” that the money will materialise despite knowing, for example, that this government previously promised colleges millions of pounds and then just took it away to spend on other areas – on that occasion, a teacher pay deal.

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Which begs a rather tricky question for Mr Dey: if it was reckless to ask for more money to be spent without saying where it was going to come from, what word would he use to describe his decision to actually spend more money without being able to say where it was going to come from?

Or do those standards only apply to other people?