Mega London college group gives staff another ‘landmark’ pay rise

A large London college group has today announced another “landmark” pay deal for staff – its second in the past four years.

Capital City College Group has agreed to an inflation-busting 9 per cent pay rise for staff on £30,000 and under from August 2022, while staff paid between £30,001 and £45,000 per year will get a 5 per cent rise, with a further 1 per cent in January 2023.

It follows 10 days of strike action last year.

CCCG rewarded its staff with a 5 per cent pay rise in 2018. Shortly after, the group ran into significant financial difficulty after finding a surprise £10 million deficit.

The college group has since improved its financial position and recorded a £167,000 operating surplus in 2020/21. CCCG was unable to say how much its new pay deal will cost the group in total annually at the time of going to press.

The Association of Colleges is currently recommending its members give staff a 2.5 per cent pay rise this year.

Roy O’Shaughnessy, chief executive of CCCG said: “Given the national cost-of-living crisis affecting all our staff, the financial constraints we are working under and the need for any pay award to be sustainable over the long-term, we had to find a difficult balance between what we can afford and what is fair for as many of our staff as possible. Having secured this pay deal, we feel that we can look to the future with some confidence.”

O’Shaughnessy added that recruitment is a significant challenge for the college sector and matching the salaries from many different sectors to “meet the needs and expectations of industry has been tough”.

“This award helps enable this and ensures we can deliver high quality and industry standard education,” he said.

The deal includes an increase in hourly paid lecturer (HPL) rates for the 2022/23 academic year and these rates will increase further in line with the pay award, a spokesperson said. This is worth up to a 15 per cent increase on the hourly rate for HPLs, worth up to an extra £4 per hour. The hourly paid support staff will see their hourly rates increase by 9 per cent.

The University and College Union said it has also secured an increase in holiday entitlement by three days, accompanied by a harmonisation of holiday entitlement across CCCG.

UCU regional official Adam Lincoln said: “This deal is the result of determined organising and industrial action from our members at CCCG.

“Crucially, it demonstrates that college employers have the resources to offer decent pay rises, which go some way towards protecting low-paid staff from the cost-of-living crisis.”

The UCU also today announced a pay agreement with Waltham Forest College which will see an average pay award of 6.1 per cent for all staff and the extension of the “lecturer pay scale by two spinal points”.