Bosses insult FE teachers with miserly 2.5 percent

College workers were on strike last year (Picture: Margot Hill)

Bosses’ organisation, the Association of Colleges, has offered further education (FE) workers a pay rise of just 2.5 percent.

That means FE teachers’ pay will now be around £9,000 per year less than that of school teachers, even though they do similar work.

And the low offer does nothing to address legacy of years of below-inflation pay rises.

The news comes after members of the NEU education union voted to accept a 5.5 percent pay rise for school teachers.

The school’s pay offer doesn’t apply NEU members in 40 sixth form colleges who are now being balloted for strikes.

Discussing the pay offer, FE lecturer Sean Vernell told Socialist Worker, “Everyone’s fuming about it. Yet we haven’t even had an indicative ballot for industrial action. “It’s hard for a lot of people.

Further education has lost 25,000 posts but student numbers have stayed the same.

“The exodus used to be from teaching to FE but now it’s the other way. We hardly ever get people who come from being a teacher. They go to be teachers.

“It’s very difficult for them to recruit people in FE because of the conditions and the workload.

“We often teach working class kids who are seen as failing, the ones the government doesn’t care about. It’s kids who are having to retake their GCSEs.

“Staff want to deliver the best but are finding it ever harder. We need a fight. The workers have shown they want to fight and we’ve won a number of local fights.

“If we don’t do it now, we never will. The NEU were offered 5.5 percent because they fought.”

The UCU university union is also campaigning for national pay bargaining in further education to end a system where individual colleges do not have to implement national agreed pay rises.