The Association of Colleges held a closed session at this week’s conference to debate the pros and cons of a pay review body for colleges. Afterwards, FE Week spoke with chief executive David Hughes to find out how discussions for this “complex” but “seductive” proposal had progressed.
While the creation of a pay review body for further education is “seductive”, leaders are “quite nervous” about the proposal, says David Hughes.
The chief executive of the Association of Colleges said his organisation had informally consulted members about the prospect of a pay review body in recent months as a vehicle to close the £9,000 pay gap between school and college teachers.
He told FE Week the AoC began canvassing opinions when it anticipated a change in government, since it considered Labour was “more likely” to support the setting up of independent pay review bodies that make pay recommendations for public sector workforces.
The first evidence of this came last month when the government unveiled plans to revive the School Support Staff Negotiating Body and set up an adult social care negotiating body.
Seductive but complex
The arguments for a FE pay review body were strengthened after the Department for Education excluded FE colleges from a £1.2 billion pay rise pot in July and used the excuse that colleges did not have their own pay review body like schools do through the School Teacher Review Body (STRB).
Hughes said: “It’s a seductive idea, because you go, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if we just had one’, and it said colleges need a 35 per cent pay award and then DfE went, OK, we’ll do it,’ and Treasury gave the money.”
But even if the money was there for universally funded pay rises, an FE pay body would have an “enormous” job to standardise wages across the sector because pay scales vary between colleges.
“We know that a lot of colleges will pay a premium for a construction lecturer, for instance, because they need to recognise the labour market as it is,” Hughes explained.
In September, education secretary Bridget Phillipson instructed the STRB to consider the impact on FE when making recommendations on teacher pay. Sources at the time speculated that official advice from the STRB on the gap between school and college pay would be harder for the Treasury to ignore.
Ultimately, Hughes thinks a new FE pay review body is unlikely given the “number of years it would take to implement something that made any sense”.
If anything, this probably highlights how effective the AOC are in recommending pay rises…
If AOC are flagging concerns over the harmonisation of pay rates and how it would be an enormous job to implement, doesn’t that variation in between colleges totally undermine how meaningful AOC recommendations of x% each year are?
Bottom line is, if you play a leading role in perpetuating pay inequity across the college base, how can you possibly make a credible argument for harmonising pay with schools?
So David Hughes thinks it is not feasible because it might take a long time.
In my view this is an argument for starting work on it right away.
I believe the truth is that there will always be a substantial minority – perhaps even a majority of College Principals who will baulk at a Pay Review body, because it won’t recognise the special circumstances that apply in each college.
Let’s remember we are in this situation because successive Principals have made choices over the last 32 years to give their staff pay a lower priority than building up their local empires.
If Principals are saying something different now, then they need to admit that many of them have contributed to this sad legacy.
What is required is for the government to take the bull by the horns and impose a new legal settlement on Further Education. It will indeed take time to harmonise salaries across England, but it will be worth it.
So much less movement because of the perceived greener pastures in neighbouring colleges; so much fairer if all FE staff know how they fit into a national salary scale.
So much easier to recruit and retain staff. Golden handshakes can reflect local needs, but not the “wild west” we have now.
I estimate it would take 5 years, but a common starting salary of £31,000 for lecturers in England back paid from August 2024 would be a good start.
Let’s not forget that FE Scotland lecturers will start on £42,000 in September 2025.