College staff should be awarded a 2.5 per cent pay rise this year, the Association of Colleges has recommended.
The pay recommendation is lower than the 5.5 per cent pay rise for school teachers agreed earlier this summer, after the Labour government refused to apply the £1.2 billion public sector pay award to colleges.
The Association of Colleges (AoC) said it was “forced” to make a recommendation “far below what we believe is needed” as colleges cannot afford to give a pay rise higher than 2.5 per cent.
The AoC makes a pay recommendation each year which colleges use as a benchmark in their negotiations with unions that represent their staff. The membership body has delayed making a pay recommendation for 2024/25 since May.
Following negotiations with five trade unions representing FE workers, its formal recommendation will advise college leaders to award staff with a 2.5 per cent pay rise or £750, whichever is greater, for the 2024/25 academic year.
The college membership body explained its recommendation was above the current rate of Consumer Prices Index inflation of 2.2 per cent and above the 1.9 per cent increased 16-18-year-old funding rate for this year.
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of College said: “We are clear that after 14 years of punishing funding cuts, college pay is far below where we believe it should be and needs to be.”
He added: “Once again, we are forced to make a pay recommendation far below what we believe is needed, simply because colleges cannot afford more.”
The body has urged the Chancellor for £250 million to match the 5.5 per cent school teacher pay uplift to prevent the “unjustifiable” £10,000 pay gap between college staff and school teachers from widening.
He said: “In the spending review we will be calling for a funded plan to close the pay gap with schools and with industry over the coming years. We need to see a step change in college pay both because it is fair and right to do so, but also because colleges are central to delivering the government’s missions and ambitions, and without better pay, colleges will struggle to step up.”
Meanwhile, college unions said the recommendation was “hugely disappointing” and would neither remedy the £10,000 pay gap nor the years of below-inflation awards.
UCU members have demanded a 10 per cent pay rise or £3,000, a minimum starting salary of £30,000, national agreements on workload, national bargaining and parity with schoolteacher pay.
University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said: “Most further education teachers work on average over 48 hours a week, and around half of qualified teachers leave the sector within 3 years. This will only get worse unless we see greater investment and the closing of the pay gap.
“Labour cannot ignore the crisis in further education any longer. Their ambitious plans to develop a more skilled workforce and the creation of Skills England are in danger of failing unless they ensure better pay, a workforce strategy and a new national bargaining framework for further education.”
The AoC made a recommendation of a 6.5 per cent uplift last year, which only came after the previous Conservative government found £200 million extra funding for the sector. The government told colleges to use their cut of the 16 to 19 funding boost to boost staff pay and “address staff recruitment and retention challenges”.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has asked the School Teacher Review Body to “evidence” the impact of its pay recommendation for school teachers on the further education workforce. It is hoped this evidence could give the Department for Education a stronger case for additional funding from the Treasury to close the pay gap between teachers in schools and colleges.
The higher of 2.5% or £750 (so the pivot salary is £30k) favours the lowest paid. However, we all know that inflation doesn’t fall evenly throughout the wealth spectrum, so what this does in reality is continue and entrench wealth inequality and is little more than virtue signaling.
You could approach pay inequality differently and say that FE staff under the schools average get a 10% rise. If there is a £10k difference between FE and Schools pay, it would still take several years for parity to emerge.
For FE staff over the schools average, whatever the remained could be divided up as a fixed amount (it would obviously be significantly less than the 2.5%).
That would address teaching pay differentials between FE and Schools (over time), narrow the pay multiple differentials between the highest and lowest paid and therefore ameliorate the inequal and disproportionate impact of inflation.
Most importantly, it would allow decision makers to drop to word signaling and retain the virtue bit.
As someone who works in a college I find this hugely disappointing from the AoC. Having waited for so long is this the best they can propose? Maybe they have been tipped off about what to expect in the Autumn Statement and their lobbying has been ineffective again on this matter.