Teacher pay: The quiet before the sixth-form storm

Overlooking sixth form colleges could backfire on a government that pledged its commitment to collective pay bargaining

Overlooking sixth form colleges could backfire on a government that pledged its commitment to collective pay bargaining

11 Oct 2024, 5:00

Every teacher has at some point encountered The Quiet Student: the one who says little and whose friends speak for them. Part of our job is helping these students find their voice and their strength so they can speak up for what they need. Lately, I’ve been thinking of sixth form colleges (SFCs) in the same way.

In an emergency, rescuers are trained to initially ignore screaming people and head for the quiet ones. If you’re screaming, you’re breathing, and the quiet ones are more likely to need urgent help.

Likewise, when they do speak, make sure you listen. A famously ill-fated party leader once said, ‘Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man’ – just before he was silenced. There’s something of Iain Duncan Smith in the sixth form experience too.

Our sector is pressed on one side by the secondary behemoth, and on the other by the lumbering might of the FE sector. Squashed between them, our tiny cohort languishes – consistently successful, yet often overlooked. Neither school nor FE college, it is neglected in most policy thinking.

As a result, a tension is brewing in these settings. Parents (and ministers) may think the threat of teacher strike action is past, but in the sixth form sector at least, it is not.

And the reason the quiet one might be about to make itself heard is simple – even silly: someone somewhere has presumably forgotten we exist. 

When the new government offered a 5.5-per cent pay rise to teachers, it was on the condition that it was only for academised institutions. But not all SFCs have been able to academise, so teachers in these institutions are de facto excluded from the deal.

It isn’t necessarily that these colleges didn’t want to academise. Rather, they were not able to by law because they are Catholic. Fifteen of our 58 SFCs are Catholic – over one-quarter of the total. To become academies when the process began, they would have had to resile from their religious status by law.

Laws were changed in 2022, but the slow process of academisation only began for these settings in 2023. Many simply haven’t had the chance to complete it.

We all deserve the pay, or none of us will take it

Now, due to the tyranny of timing, they are being excluded from a pay rise. They are sitting at the back, silently stunned, left out solely on the basis of their religious character. There are grounds to suspect judicial review would find this discriminatory.

In the meantime, collective bargaining means this affects everyone teaching in SFCs. Unlike the rest of the FE sector, pay here has long been managed nationally by the Sixth Form Colleges Association and the teaching unions.

Broadly, this has worked. Teacher pay is lower in SFCs than in schools as the funding is lower, but collective bargaining has resulted in offers the profession could endorse.

The new government has put all that at risk. Its explicit manifesto commitment was to uphold collective pay bargaining, but they have done the opposite.

In essence, the SFCA can’t offer the full 5.5 per cent to all of its members, which means they can’t offer it at all – an invidious position.

Some college leaders will no doubt feel pressure to increase pay, and some teachers could accept it locally. It would be hard to blame them. But the essence of collective bargaining is that the voice of the quietest ones is amplified by being combined with the loud.

So teachers in SFCs who could receive the pay rise are currently objecting to it unless it is also available for their colleagues in non-academised, and in particular Catholic, colleges.

In spite of the rising cost of living, there is a principle to defend. We are going against our own best interests to help the quieter voice be heard. We all deserve the pay, or none of us will take it.

To destroy collective bargaining would leave the SFC sector an FE Wild West, with an inevitable downward pressure on pay.

If this government truly believes in collective bargaining, they will need to step in to finesse their pay offer.

Because the quiet one here needs serious attention, and silencing it is not an option.

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