Education Committee
Oral evidence: Impact of industrial action on university students, HC 327
Tuesday 6 February 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 February 2024.
Members present: Mr Robin Walker (Chair); Caroline Ansell; Mrs Flick Drummond; Anna Firth; Nick Fletcher; Vicky Ford; Andrew Lewer; Ian Mearns.
Questions 1 - 105
Witnesses
I: Joe Hill, Education Officer, University of Birmingham Guild of Students; Gareth Jones, Deputy President, Open University Students Association; Chloe Field, Vice-President for Higher Education, National Union of Students; Jenni Lynam, Vice-President for Undergraduate Education and Access, Oxford University Student Union.
II: Raj Jethwa, Chief Executive, Universities and Colleges Employers Association; Jo Grady, General Secretary, University and College Union; David Smy, Deputy Director of Enabling Regulation, Office for Students.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]
Witnesses: Joe Hill, Gareth Jones, Chloe Field and Jenni Lynam.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to today’s session on the impact of industrial action on university students. The first panel we will be taking oral evidence from is Joe Hill, education officer at the University of Birmingham guild of students; Mr Gareth Jones, deputy president of the Open University students association; Jenni Lynam, vice-president for undergraduate education and access at Oxford University student union; and Chloe Field, vice-president for higher education at the NUS.
Thank you for coming to give evidence to us today. My first question is what your assessment is of the scale of industrial action that we have seen since 2021, including the marking and assessment boycott, and its impact on the students you represent.
Chloe Field: The scale has been huge, not just since 2021 but for a while now. Since probably 2018, there has been huge disruption to students and specifically to international students, especially during the marking and assessment boycott, and especially those in their final year who are trying to seek employment. That creates additional issues for international students, who already face a hostile Home Office, on their right to stay in the UK and work.
We also have PGR students: postgraduate research students, who are often employees of the universities as well. They bear a double brunt: they are students suffering from disruption to their education, but they are also suffering from poor working practices, so they are facing both ends of the stick.
Despite all that, students are still very supportive of the action being taken, because they know it is such a desperate measure. They know that the disruption is not the fault of the workers, who are standing up for better working conditions, which mean better learning conditions. They know that it is the fault of employers and, to go further, the fault of the wider higher education system, which is absolutely crumbling and is no longer sustainable.
Q2 Chair: Of the students you have mentioned, would you say that there are groups where the impact continues to be felt, or have those issues largely been resolved since the end of the boycott in this space?
Chloe Field: I would say yes. It depends on the institution and when people got their marks back, but of course it will always be felt because getting graduate jobs comes within a certain period of time, and if you do not have your full transcript to apply for graduate jobs, you will have missed the boat and will have to wait for another year. It is definitely having different effects on students depending on whether future graduate employers are willing to take on students without full transcripts, so it is very varying.
Gareth Jones: For us at the Open University, the scale has definitely grown with the marking and assessment boycott. The mode of tuition at the Open University is predominately asynchronous delivery, which means that disruption due to industrial action can be mitigated differently. We can look at different tuition timetables that can take into account any industrial action.
At the Open University we can also look at the scale, which means that mitigations can be put in place where there is an opportunity to reallocate. The marking and assessment boycott definitely increased the impact on students. We saw an increase in students with mental health or anxiety challenges reaching out to us with concerns and problems. Similarly to what Chloe mentioned, final-year students reached out to us with problems with moving on to further study or employment opportunities.
Q3 Chair: What about the longer-term impact? Are you aware of students in the Open University body who continue to feel the impact of these issues, or would you say that they are largely resolved at this stage?
Gareth Jones: I would say that the issues directly related to the industrial action are largely resolved, but the wider issues that students are facing in the higher education sector are contributing to sustained anxiety and other issues.
Jenni Lynam: I echo what Chloe and Gareth have said. Oxford students have been impacted by industrial action since 2018, but it has been in short spurts. It was particularly heightened through the marking and assessment boycott, which impacted all students from undergraduate to postgraduate level.
Although the university worked really hard to get as many students as possible to graduate on time, about 8%[1] of students were left unable to graduate on the date they were supposed to. To answer your second question about the effects, our advice team at the student union has been assisting students with complaints procedures against the university until about December 2023. Those ongoing complaints have been against the effect of the boycott.
Q4 Ian Mearns: As a quick supplementary, how does the 8%[2] figure compare with the norm in previous years?
Jenni Lynam: I cannot compare it with previous years, as I do not have specific figures on that.
Q5 Chair: We would assume it is probably higher.
Jenni Lynam: Yes, but I think the marking and assessment boycott had the biggest impact on students generally.
Q6 Ian Mearns: So the number of students in an average year who would not be able to graduate on the appointed date would be much lower than that?
Jenni Lynam: Yes.
Q7 Chair: Oxford was one of the universities affected, but it was not as in the public limelight as other universities such as Cambridge, Durham and Bristol. I wonder from whether your perspective, or perhaps Chloe’s, the disproportionality has been particularly problematic for some universities.
Chloe Field: Yes, I would say so. There have been different experiences. It depends on the number of unionised staff members; it can also depend on courses whether there are a lot of staff members out on strike. Generally, the feeling is the same, but to varying degrees. The ripple effects are the same.
Q8 Chair: Joe, can I ask about your experience and your members’ experience?
Joe Hill: The marking and assessment boycott was not as strongly felt in Birmingham as in other places. There were staff who took part, but we were able to graduate everyone on time and progress all students as expected.
But we do have the same problems as the rest of the sector, in the sense that, as Chloe said, the dispute since 2018 has blighted the experience of a lot of cohorts of students. Aside from our current first-year cohort, we do not have any students who have not been disrupted by either the pandemic or industrial action. It is really hard to overstate the impact that that will have had on people’s engagement. They are coming from online teaching at school to university and are not necessarily seeing their academics in that personal sense as a pillar of support. That has affected the way people engage with the university, particularly with things like value-for-money concerns.
I would also address the point about the ongoing effect on students. While the impact on students from this dispute is paused for the minute, there are still other industrial disputes at the moment that are affecting students on professional placements or commuter students travelling to campus. The current industrial climate is something that still quite keenly affects students.
Q9 Chair: Am I right in thinking that there is a relatively high proportion of commuter students travelling to campus? The university in Worcester certainly has that, and I can understand that being a more general point in the midlands as well.
Joe Hill: Yes, definitely, and it is compounded by things like the cost of living. It is a time of intense pressure for students, and industrial strife does not make that any better.
Q10 Chair: You have partly answered the question about the main ways in which students have been impacted. Beyond the international students that Chloe pointed to, are there any particular groups that have felt the impact more substantially? Do you feel that the disproportionate impact on postgraduate students and international students has been addressed now, or are there long-term issues that affect some of those people? For instance, are you aware of any people whose status in the UK has been fundamentally changed by the outcomes of the marking and assessment boycott?
Chloe Field: I am not aware of any specific examples, unfortunately. However, the situation with PGR students, especially during strike days, is that if they are not on strike or are not already a staff member, they can often be called to fill in for striking staff. Of course, that does not resolve any kind of underlying problem for the university, and it puts a lot of pressure on PGR students.
That is a situation that happens during strikes, but it also happens when there are not strike days, because universities are always increasing the number of students but are not increasing capacity. All too often, we see PGR students having to come in to do the work that full-time academic staff would usually have to do. That really lessens the quality of learning for students, but also puts a lot of pressure on PGR students. It is a long-term situation, not just something that happens during strike days, and it is a continuing issue for PGR students who face these poor working practices.
Q11 Chair: Presumably you would suggest that the solution is to have more full-time staff and less reliance on PGR students.
Chloe Field: I would say it is about investing in staff who can fully commit to it. Of course I am not saying that PGR students should not be offered employment, but they should not be put under the same pressure as full-time staff while they are on really low wages. Also, PGR students are there to learn while they are teaching, so pressure to fulfil that full-time academic staff role should not be put on them when they are still learning and investing in their studies. The important thing is to invest in staff and students.
Q12 Vicky Ford: You mentioned that there is variation between universities and said that there was higher strike action where there are a lot of unionised members. You also said that different types of courses were affected more. Which of those has the bigger impact: the number of unionised members or the types of course?
Chloe Field: I am not too sure. It just depends on the—
Vicky Ford: You haven’t looked at that?
Chloe Field: No, I haven’t looked at that.
Q13 Vicky Ford: Is there a way to categorise the types of courses? Do you say that science-related courses are less affected and that arts-related courses are more affected?
Chair: Jenni is nodding.
Jenni Lynam: Yes. In terms of divisions, humanities and social sciences were more impacted than medical sciences and MPLS in Oxford, because of the number of unionised workers in those divisions.
Q14 Vicky Ford: Gareth, you mentioned the impact on students’ mental health; I will come on to that.
Some students have suggested to me that they felt the NUS did not do enough to represent them because the union, being a union, had empathy with unionised members. Chloe, you said that you felt that students were empathetic towards the need for this action. What data leads you to make that assertion?
Chloe Field: We regularly poll students on their feelings towards it. It depends on local areas.
Vicky Ford: You regularly poll.
Chloe Field: Yes: 70% currently support strike action.
Q15 Vicky Ford: Of those who took part in the poll?
Chloe Field: Yes.
Q16 Vicky Ford: And what proportion of students take part in the poll?
Chloe Field: I am not too sure. That is how it is with any kind of poll, isn’t it?
Q17 Vicky Ford: It could be 2% of students.
Chloe Field: Potentially.
Q18 Vicky Ford: It would be extremely helpful to understand whether that poll—I once studied maths—is statistically accurate enough in terms of the cohort that you have.
Chloe Field: There is polling, and there is also speaking. I speak to multiple student unions each week, in fact, and—
Vicky Ford: But you speak to the unions, not—
Chloe Field: We speak to student unions and to students. We poll students, and we are regularly on the ground. We also see student unions doing referendums on their own students, and consistently we see a majority of students coming out in support of the strikes.
Q19 Vicky Ford: Chloe, I am just going to interrupt. It would be helpful in understanding your case if we could have evidence that there was a statistically large enough sample of student support in those polls, so that we know they are accurate.
Chloe Field: I do not know all the calculations, unfortunately, but I can find them for you if you are interested.
Q20 Vicky Ford: Chloe, I will leave it there. Maybe you could come back to the Committee.
I think mental health support is related, because it is important that students feel that they have support. Do you have evidence of the sort of support you put in for students to help them with what must have been increased stress and anxiety? Jenni, you are nodding. Do you want to go first?
Jenni Lynam: As a student union, we have an advice service that is always open for students to get in touch with. It helped a lot of students with the complaints procedure with which they wanted to engage with the effects of the boycott. We also put out a lot of comms to students to inform them of the ways in which they could complain and lobby against the university to increase their efforts to come to a deal with the UCU. On university support for mental health, I think the university was more focused on getting students to graduate than on putting specific things in place to support their mental health, in terms of welfare services that the university already has.
Q21 Vicky Ford: So you think that if this happened again, it should be putting in more mental health support, as well as help for the logistics of getting through graduation.
Jenni Lynam: Yes, definitely. I think a lot of students were really happy to have been able to graduate, and that was thanks to the university’s work on that.
Q22 Vicky Ford: Are any of you aware of universities where there was particularly good practice in putting together that mental wellbeing support as well as the help with graduation, so that one could learn from best practice? Gareth?
Gareth Jones: The Open University—as student representatives we actually advocated for this—put in a more tailored one-to-one approach where necessary with students. Instead of having a catch-all situation and saying, “We will email you every couple of weeks with any update if your results are delayed,” for those students who were identified as needing more support there was more practical, one-to-one keeping in contact.
Vicky Ford: Joe?
Joe Hill: I was just going to make the point that a lot of my colleagues who were there at the time said that because we were not going to be affected as badly by the marking and assessment boycott and the university had a decent idea of that, doing communications that were reassuring to students but did not stoke panic was a difficult challenge. There were national headlines every week saying, “This many students will not graduate at Russell Group universities.” The union worked closely with the university on how to tailor those comms, but it is a very difficult balance. When you are only getting something from the university every three weeks but see the BBC News headlines popping up saying that there will be a boycott, it is very hard to reassure people.
Vicky Ford: Jenni, I see you nodding.
Jenni Lynam: Yes. I think you have pointed out something really important: communication with students is key. Because every department in Oxford was affected differently, there was no centralised way to inform students of the ways in which they would be affected. For future industrial action, universities need to focus more on how they communicate with students in order to reassure them and let them know about timelines and timescales.
Q23 Vicky Ford: And bespoke to each course.
Jenni Lynam: Yes.
Q24 Chair: Your point is very valid. If the impact across different departments is different, surely the department should have a role in helping to manage that communication.
Jenni Lynam: Definitely, but I think it should come from the central university to inform individual departments of the actions that are going to be taken. Students were getting different messages depending on what department they were from.
Vicky Ford: So it is about clear messaging, as tailored to individual needs as possible. Thank you.
Q25 Anna Firth: I want to carry on with the examination of the mental health difficulties caused to students by the industrial action, and try to get a feel for the extent of them. We have had evidence from students highlighting the negative impact of the industrial action on their mental health, particularly due to the lack of clarity and support that we have talked about.
I want to put a couple of quotes to you. One student said, “I found myself in a state of heightened anxiety as I wasn’t able to move on from the end of the module. I was worrying about my results.” Another said, “My summer was filled with stress and panic as I was due to start a job in the October that was reliant on me gaining my degree.” Do you recognise those comments? Could you give us a bit more detail on the extent of the mental health problems that were caused? Are you able to quantify that for us?
Gareth Jones: Those quotes have come from the written submission that I put together for the Committee before Christmas. They came from some surveying that we did of students in preparation for that submission. They were just a handful of quotes that we had, but the feeling was quite widespread from those affected. Naturally, those who chose to take part in the survey were those who were affected and had a stake in putting across their point, but even for students who were not directly affected, the nature of industrial action means that there is uncertainty. It is supposed to be disruptive; that is the purpose of it. Even those who were ultimately not affected still had that anxiety of, “Will my results be delayed? Will I be waiting a long time for my assignment to come back?”. Those are just a small number of quotes from probably a wider picture of students.
Q26 Anna Firth: We have heard further evidence that some students were undergoing counselling and the industrial action made their existing mental health difficulties worse. Do you recognise that as well?
Chloe Field: I think what is important to address is why students are in such a crisis state in the first place. Of course, industrial action might have an impact, but students are in a mental health crisis already, chiefly because of financial pressures, isolation and the fact that the general experience in the world right now as a young person is hard. There is no future for us. Currently, there is an existentialism felt among students and young people, which is already causing a lot of mental health issues, so this is just on top of that.
Q27 Anna Firth: Absolutely, Chloe. Would you say that that state of mental health was well known to the universities before the industrial action?
Chloe Field: Yes, but to put it all on the universities—in terms of helping to resolve the dispute, they definitely could have talked to UCEA if they were thinking from that angle—but we have to look a bit wider right now. The NHS is falling apart. There is no mental health support for students.
Q28 Anna Firth: I understand that there are wider issues you would like to discuss, but we are concerned today with the industrial action that took place last summer. If the universities were well aware of the state of student mental health, should they not have taken that into account first before deciding on the industrial action, and secondly when deciding how it might be handled to minimise the inevitable mental health impact?
Chloe Field: Well, I understand that you want to talk about this specific instance, but you can’t look at mental health without looking at the wider issues. First, we shouldn’t be getting to this point, but also universities do know that students are facing a mental health crisis. So do the Government, but nothing is being done.
Q29 Anna Firth: We are talking about the extent to which, with the evidence that we have seen, students were adversely impacted by last year’s industrial action, particularly by the poor communications. Does anyone else want to comment on the extent of that negative impact before I go on to the interventions?
Jenni Lynam: I would just echo what everyone has said so far. I think that students with pre-existing mental health issues were definitely disproportionately affected by the marking and assessment boycott. It is a tough one because you cannot dismiss people who want to go on strike because they want to improve their working conditions, but, also, that is going to have an adverse effect on students.
Q30 Anna Firth: Which I suppose brings me on to the next question. If you know that you have a vulnerable cohort and you are going to embark on industrial action, isn’t there an even higher duty—if I can use that word—on the universities to make sure that interventions, support and counselling are available for those students?
Jenni Lynam: Yes, of course, and universities should have stepped up at the time to put more interventions into place, but obviously the effects were so great that there was not much preparation time to get things into place.
Q31 Anna Firth: Were any interventions put in place, as a pre-emptive measure, to lessen the impact of this industrial action?
Chloe Field: I think the only intervention would have been getting UCEA to agree to a deal that would have ended the strike. There was always going to be disruption, and no amount of counselling can get rid of that. That is the only main mitigation that could ever be made—for UCEA to have given a fair deal to UCU.
Q32 Anna Firth: Well, that is one point of view, but obviously the causation here was the industrial action, which impacted on the students’ mental health over that summer period. My question remains: are you aware of any other interventions that were thought of in advance, or were put in place once it was obvious that students’ mental health was being affected?
Joe Hill: Our university made preparations, as many did, for the marking and assessment boycott, but the marking process is quite closed off. It is not something that students are necessarily that familiar with. Saying that you will have markers from subject specialisms, but not the school marking, which might increase flexibility, does not necessarily mean that much to a student who is worried about their graduation. It is quite a technical process.
I would echo the points about how it is really hard to untie it from the other disruption and things that we have had. Student mental health has been an issue that, to be fair to universities, has been very firmly on their radars, and lots of them have expanded their counselling teams. However, to the point made by others, it is not something that you can necessarily counsel away if someone has been told that their graduation or graduate job is going to be affected. Whether it is through communication, one-to-one counselling, or whatever, it is very hard to get away from that fundamental issue that has been caused.
Q33 Anna Firth: Does anybody else want to come in on additional support offered for students over those summer months?
Jenni Lynam: I cannot think of any specific welfare measures, but I think that the university was more focused on being flexible with marking criteria and assessments in order to get people to graduate more quickly.
Q34 Chair: On your point about the 8%[3], I think you said, of people whose graduations were delayed, were they all sorted in the end? Have those people all now graduated, or are there some people on that list who are still affected?
Jenni Lynam: I know of a couple of groups of students who are still awaiting some marks, but I think that the majority of students have now been able to graduate and now have a complete transcript.
Q35 Chair: Chloe, are you aware of any universities where that number is substantially larger or the impact is more long-term?
Chloe Field: I don’t know of any specific unis with that delay to graduation.
Q36 Mrs Drummond: Following on from Vicky’s remarks about how you knew how much support there was, I think there was something from The Tab. How widely read is The Tab student newspaper?
Chloe Field: I do not have their readership stuff, but a fair bit. Again, I know that they have stats, but I am not sure how they verify student status.
Q37 Mrs Drummond: They are the ones that came up with 70%, but I think it was done through a poll on Instagram, so the methodology is not brilliant. Going back to the support for the strikes, 70% supported the lecturer strikes and only 25% supported the marking and assessment boycott. Does that reflect the sentiment in your universities?
Gareth Jones: Yes, exactly that. We definitely see sympathy for those taking part in industrial action more broadly and we probably did see a shift in sentiment from students as the marking and assessment boycott came into place. We did some informal polling—it was informal, so I wouldn’t want to validate the methodology for it, but we did see, by 60:40, people coming out opposing the marking and assessment boycott; this was out of 12,000 responses on that one. Our other feedback shows that people are generally supportive of industrial action and the reasons behind it. They just felt that this particular tactic was disproportionately affecting students.
Q38 Mrs Drummond: You are consumers now, because you pay tuition fees and things, but you are still happy that people are not teaching you and providing the service that you are buying.
Chloe Field: It’s not about that. Do staff enjoy not getting paid for weeks on end? It’s not about “enjoying” it. It’s about supporting the reasons for it and the desperate need for that action to be taken, because currently learning conditions and working conditions are suffering and they are intrinsically linked.
Q39 Mrs Drummond: Do you think the support for industrial action has changed over time—over the last year or so?
Jenni Lynam: I think it depends on the type of industrial action. In the previous industrial action, a lot of students were on the picket lines at Oxford, but with the marking and assessment boycott—honestly, I think there was just frustration among students, and it comes down to what they think they are entitled to in coming to the university. At the same time, everyone is sympathetic to the reasons for striking. It’s a very difficult balancing act for all students.
Q40 Mrs Drummond: I am surprised that the support was so high, because you are there to learn and you have only three or maybe four years at university, yet you are having chunks of time when you are not able to access your education.
Joe Hill: I think it is just that nuance: students obviously aren’t supportive of disruption—there are the value-for-money concerns that there were right at the start of the strikes—but whether you think this is the correct view or not, they don’t believe that it is the lecturers’ fault. They see the responsibility as lying with the universities. Of course that is a generalisation, and I understand your worries about methodology on polling, but whenever we have taken student opinion, even if it might not be the biggest sample size, we do see strong and consistent support for the lecturers.
Q41 Ian Mearns: How would you rate student awareness of the student complaints process and their rights during the industrial action?
Chair: Jenni, you have mentioned the complaints process a couple of times, so do you want to start on that?
Jenni Lynam: Yes. I would say students are aware of it only when they need it, to be honest, and I think that is where we should step in, as student unions, to help students with that whole process. The process is quite simple for students to follow, and we have an advice team who help students with the process.
Q42 Ian Mearns: You are saying that to lodge a complaint—you get support from the student union—is relatively easy to do, so what is your assessment of how your universities managed student complaints about disruption to learning due to industrial action?
Jenni Lynam: I know that there was quite a lot of backlog in the proctors’ office, which is our central body that deals with complaints and such, but also we, as student unions, tried to bring students together to launch group complaints. That would be a group of students from one course coming together and approaching the university as a cohort rather than as individuals.
Q43 Ian Mearns: Is your experience similar, Gareth and Joe?
Gareth Jones: Yes, it is very similar for us. We have our own individual representation service at the students association. We saw a marked increase over the summer in referrals for complaints. The university saw, naturally, an increase in complaints from that. The process did seem to be quite straightforward. My concern is for students who are a bit daunted about making complaints and they tend to be the ones who might be more affected by increased mental health or anxiety challenges, so they do not want to put their heads on the block to make a complaint. There can definitely be more support, but that is going to be an ongoing thing; that is not just an industrial action response on that point.
Joe Hill: We have had slightly different issues, in that we have not seen a particularly large number of complaints, but I think that is probably because we did not see the marking and assessment boycott, and the really acute disruption in that way. I guess that is what has driven the increases elsewhere. We have the same kind of approach; we are very open to supporting students and informing them about the process. However, the process is not very clear in students’ minds. I don’t think that it is an obvious step that students would think, “I exhaust all the routes at my university and then I go to the OIA.” I don’t think most students would be able to tell you what the OIA is. We would be more than happy to support them, but as far as we are aware at Birmingham no students have exhausted all the university routes, and obviously there wasn’t the marking and assessment boycott to trigger that.
Q44 Ian Mearns: I understand that the University of Manchester awarded compensation of up to £500 to students who experienced a delay in receiving their degree due to the boycott. That is an interesting way to manage that. What constitutes a good outcome to a complaint from your perspective?
Gareth Jones: I know that the Open University offered monetary compensation related to the marking and assessment boycott of up to £500. They followed the OIA guidelines before things reached the OIA stage.
I think a good outcome of any complaint is resolution, to be perfectly frank. Compensation is only compensation; it is not the outcome that students want. The actual conclusion of the industrial action and the chance to resolve the outstanding issues was the best outcome they could have asked for.
Q45 Ian Mearns: From your perspective, given the way in which universities manage the complaints process, did students end up getting those decent outcomes?
Gareth Jones: I think so. You would have to speak to the university for the exact stats, but the number of students who progressed through the different stages of complaints is actually relatively low. Very few went to stage 2, and I am not aware of anyone who went to the OIA for it. There was obviously that satisfaction of resolution from students about how complaints were handled.
Q46 Ian Mearns: And that is a common experience, I take it.
Jenni Lynam: Yes. I think that compensation is always on the table for complaints procedures, but as far as I’m aware that didn’t happen at Oxford.
Q47 Mrs Drummond: Talking about the mitigations taken by the universities, particularly for the marking and assessment boycott, they tried to limit disruption, so that students were not disadvantaged. However, the NUS criticised these mitigations, describing them as an attempt to undermine strikes. Would you agree with that view?
Chloe Field: Shall I answer?
Mrs Drummond: Go on. I am being very provocative here, so that’s fine.
Chloe Field: Essentially, mitigation policies are a sticking plaster. They are never going to resolve what students are facing. They might ease it a bit, but at the end of the day it depends on the mitigation policies. It can be that instead of work being double-marked, it is only marked by one person, which means that people are not getting due credit given to the work that they have put in and are not getting the proper assessment, which causes disparities in marks and, going further into your progression, in your education. It is not consistent.
There are a lot of things that can weaken the quality of people’s assessment, but at the end of the day, the mitigations are never going to solve anything. I always say that the only mitigation to this is ending the dispute by providing fair working conditions; that is the only mitigation that will work.
Q48 Mrs Drummond: Do others agree with that?
Gareth Jones and Jenni Lynam indicated assent.
Joe Hill: I tend to agree that the ultimate mitigation is resolving the dispute, but with students, depending on their personal support for the strikes, you would have a whole range of opinion on the point about what extent universities should mitigate things or try to reduce the action.
Q49 Mrs Drummond: Some universities are trying to reduce the impact of the marking and assessment boycott by increasing communications, reallocating marking duties and providing students with provisional marks. Was that effective or—going back to the point—were you not actually bothered about it? We talked earlier about vulnerable students with mental health issues—surely those mitigations were helping those vulnerable people?
Gareth Jones: I would not say that I was not bothered about it. From my perspective, and that of the OU students association, we were predominantly about the student experience in this. We were looking for a resolution. I appreciate that there are different sides to the argument that is causing the industrial action to take place, but we were looking for a resolution. We were quite keen that the quality of any outcomes was not adversely affected by this.
For example, you mentioned reallocation—that was the predominant mitigation that took place at the Open University, which was possible because of its scale. It has a lot more academics who are able to cover those taking part in industrial action. We appreciate the efforts to get people to graduate on time on that side of things, while still respecting the right of those taking part in the industrial action to do so.
Q50 Mrs Drummond: You have all touched on this, but what further action would you have liked to see universities take to reduce the impact of industrial action on students? You all support the industrial action, but apart from the university coming to a negotiation and coming to a close on this, is there anything else you would have liked to see them do?
Chloe Field: The dispute on the marking and assessments boycott was not about local agreements, but UCEA is a membership organisation, so universities have a voice to end the dispute with UCEA if that is what they want to do. Listening to student voices, listening to staff voices, actually representing the people that these universities work for, and putting that to UCEA to end the dispute would have been the ultimate thing that universities could have done.
Q51 Nick Fletcher: We have touched on this a little, but during the marking and assessment boycott, some universities took a no-detriment approach to allocating students’ final marks. That approach ensured that a student’s final mark would be the highest mark between the results of previous assessments or their actual delayed mark. What are your views on that? I will start with you, Jenni, as you are nodding.
Jenni Lynam: That was probably the best way to ensure that students were protected in the marking and assessment boycott. Everything that happened with the mitigations that Oxford, certainly, took with examinations had positive effects on rethinking how we assess students and whether double-blind marking needs to be done every year. If we take that away, what does that do in terms of staff workload? How does that help staff to reduce the workload, which was the cause of the industrial action in the first place? So I would support the no-detriment approach.
Q52 Nick Fletcher: Does it lessen the value of the marks if we go for the higher mark every time? Does it lessen the value of the degree? Were all universities doing this, or just some?
Jenni Lynam: I am not aware of whether all universities did it.
Nick Fletcher: According to our brief, it was just some.
Chloe Field: For students who are progressing into the rest of their undergrad, postgrad or continuing studies, it is not the best form of assessment if they are getting marked higher than they might be next year. It is hard for students to understand what their true assessment is if they are just getting marked higher. At the end of the day, there needs to be quality assessment, and that requires a lot of work from a lot of staff. They showed that by withdrawing their labour, which meant that a lot of students unfortunately suffered. But that shows the importance of those staff members and why they should be valued.
Joe Hill: Birmingham did not use provisional marks—partly because of the scale of the action, I imagine, but also because they kept some of the policies around flexibility and marking that they brought in during covid for staff flexibility. That meant that, rather than rigidly having people from your school or department marking work, it could be discipline experts and people like that. So it was still people with expertise marking, but not necessarily the people who might have marked the work in 2017. According to conversations with university staff, that was something that they kept just because it seemed like best practice to keep it and for the rest of the sector to consider. I am sure it would not have mitigated things everywhere, because there is only so much redundancy you can create.
Chair: But it fits with Jenni’s point about learning things that might be better for the long run, in any case.
Joe Hill: Yes. I am sure you can talk to someone from—
Q53 Nick Fletcher: Are degrees from some universities going to be worth more than ones from other universities because they did not use that, or will it make things unfair when people move on to their next career?
Joe Hill: I would not want to comment on the value of different degrees based on that. I think students would want to be sure that value is being maintained, and that has to be communicated carefully to students, and probably done in co-operation with students, if this is a route that is to be taken. It would just take more examination. Degree classifications have to go through lots of detailed quality-assurance processes and all sorts of things, so I think it is one for the industry to consider.
Gareth Jones: We did not use a no-detriment policy at the Open University; we relied predominantly on reallocation, which meant a delay. What the others have said about quality assurance is important to ensure that we are not getting questions such as those you are asking at the moment about the value of a degree. But considering that that did not happen at the Open University, I do not really have a wider comment.
Q54 Andrew Lewer: In response to last summer’s action, the UCEA recommended that universities cut the pay of boycotting staff. I wondered what your assessment is of that response and of UCEA’s action during the recent industrial action.
Joe Hill: That is one more for university HR teams to deal with than us. If I had to give a general view, I think that students would rather have measures that were not seen to undermine staff or to hurt staff for fighting for fair pay and conditions which, as we have discussed, we think there is general student sympathy for. If I had to give a view, I think that students would be supportive but, as I say, it is really a question for universities to consider.
Q55 Andrew Lewer: Could the UCEA do anything else to help reduce the impact of industrial action in future, if this happens again?
Joe Hill: Aside from getting back into talks with the UCU, no.
Q56 Andrew Lewer: Jenni, what was your reaction to and assessment of the UCEA’s proposal to cut staff pay? Also, what do you think that the UCEA could do in future to help cut down the impact on students, if there is action like this again?
Jenni Lynam: I think that was an awful response, to be honest. If you want staff to stop striking, you should work with them, instead of putting things in place that stop deals from happening.
Andrew Lewer: Gareth?
Gareth Jones: Very similar. I know that the Open University did a 20% deduction, which was felt to be more proportionate, considering the work that was not undertaken at the time. That was made in agreement with the local UCU. The larger deductions are punitive, which does not help the environment that the staff are in, or to resolve the dispute. That deduction is now another thing on the table that needs to be negotiated, so it does not help the overall situation.
Q57 Andrew Lewer: In future, what should the UCEA do instead, or as well, to reduce the impact?
Gareth Jones: I am going to sound like a broken record here: it is the resolution of the dispute, but the response has to be proportionate. The university doing a 100% deduction when staff might be losing only a couple of hours of work a week is just not proportionate in that environment.
Q58 Andrew Lewer: But the work that they are not doing has a disproportionate impact, in that not getting a degree mark has a bigger impact than missing some lectures or something.
Gareth Jones: But not 100%.
Chloe Field: I think it was disgraceful. Again, UCEA had the ultimate power to resolve this dispute, to get around the table with the UCU, but it refused to do so for a period, which just prolonged the dispute. If UCEA cared about ending the dispute, it would have put forward fair working conditions and put a fair deal on the table. That is the only way that the dispute could be resolved. In terms of efficiency, deducting pay from staff is not only not efficient, but completely immoral. When people cry out for better working conditions and better pay, they are being penalised for exercising something that they have a legal right to do.
Q59 Andrew Lewer: Why is it unfair not to pay people for not doing the work they are paid to do?
Chloe Field: Because it was not their full amount of work. Again, UCEA could have just agreed to a deal. They could have sat round a table with the UCU, but they didn’t.
Q60 Andrew Lewer: Is it the percentage rather than the principle?
Chloe Field: No. I don’t agree with penalising striking staff.
Q61 Andrew Lewer: Joe, last summer, the Office for Students—the higher education regulator—wrote to universities reminding them of their duties to protect student interests during industrial action. Is there anything more you think the Office for Students could do to help reduce impacts?
Joe Hill: I don’t think the Office for Students has particular presence or standing in the minds of students. Public letters and things are great, but I don’t really think they went any way to reassuring students in the wake of national media coverage. They certainly do not have the same value as local communication from the university. Again, as long as there is a dispute, there is only so much that the OfS can do, aside from encouraging some sort of resolution.
Jenni Lynam: I think this has taught us that there needs to be more of a common approach to universities dealing with industrial action that puts more provisions into place for students—specifically, welfare provisions to support students’ mental health when they are going through this. The OfS should be lobbying universities to collectively improve that.
Gareth Jones: I think that that needs to be balanced with respecting the autonomy of individual institutions. We need that set standard, the mental health provision needs to be in place, and set support needs to happen. But students choose universities for particular reasons, and we have different demographics attending different universities, and they might need that more tailored support within that university.
Chloe Field: I completely agree with Joe. There is only so much that the OfS can do while there is a dispute going on. At the end of the day, they can use their influence and power to get the employers around the table and get universities to improve their working conditions and learning conditions for students. But at the end of the day, as long as there is a dispute, there is very little they can really do to mitigate.
Joe Hill: Just to follow up on that, if the OfS is going to be urging universities to make sure that no students are negatively impacted by a dispute, there has to be something to back that up—some sort of consequence for the universities—because, clearly, they did not maintain that. If the OfS is regulating universities with any teeth, there has to be some sort of consequence for universities failing to maintain good outcomes for students.
Q62 Chair: Gareth, you made the point about universities’ independence as institutions, which I know they guard very fiercely. Do you feel that this dispute was prolonged by the group approach? You mentioned that, in the case of the Open University, deductions were made by agreement with the local universities. Do you feel that the individual universities had sufficient flexibility to take an approach that could minimise the impact on students?
Gareth Jones: Yes, in terms of minimising the impact. They can put their own measures in place within that institution to do so. The nature of collective bargaining is that, in the view of the universities, to break ranks with UCEA would have been potentially detrimental to the wider sector.
Chair: Chloe, do you have any views on that?
Chloe Field: Obviously, for universities, it would give them more power to be able to come to a local resolution. Having that group, collective dispute means that, when there is bad practice from UCEA, it affects everyone, but then, if there is good practice and an agreement is reached, it also affects everyone, and it does not have to rely on your university being willing or not. So, again—
Chair: Swings and roundabouts.
Chloe Field: Yes.
Q63 Chair: Finally, I want to ask a question of all the panel. In October, the Department for Education launched a consultation on introducing minimum service levels at universities. What is your view on that? If you perhaps feel that that is not the solution, what else do you think the Department for Education should be doing to improve industrial relations in this space? I am very happy to hear views from across the panel on the idea of minimum service levels and how you think it should work, but also what else you would like to see done. I will start with Joe.
Joe Hill: I could not say how minimum service levels would be practically implemented. It is not something that I would support, because I think it would be undermining the staff in their dispute. The ultimate goal should be to resolve the root cause of the dispute rather than to try and keep on with mitigations and mitigations against the impacts. So, I do not think minimum service levels would be particularly appropriate.
Jenni Lynam: We held a student council a few weeks ago and a vote was cast to publicly denounce the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, which we acted on. We have also been mandated as sabbatical officers to lobby against the university imposing the Act. I agree with Joe that this is just another strategy to prolong not facing the real problem that all universities are facing, which is poor working conditions that are affecting staff.
Q64 Chair: What do you think the DfE should be doing about the conditions, arrangements and funding arrangements?
Jenni Lynam: I do not have a magic solution right now, but it should be about listening to the perspective and the voices of the staff who are on strike and suffering, and not dictating to them what they should and should not be doing in this.
Gareth Jones: Similarly to Joe and Jenni, I would not be in support of minimum service levels. I think they undermine the rights of those who want to take part in industrial action. There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to this either. Coming from a distance learning institution, as I mentioned at the start, we have asynchronous delivery. There are other ways in which universities can help protect the student experience when it comes to industrial action. Obviously the marking and assessment boycott was a learning curve for everyone in the sector, but we would not be in support of it.
As Jenni said, I do not think there is a magic silver bullet that will fix this situation. I am sure that many people have tried to figure out how to do this and have not done it, so I definitely do not have the solution. But there is definitely a wide range of sector issues that need addressing that come together to create the environment.
Chloe Field: It is not a big surprise that I completely disagree with minimum service levels. When staff, not just in universities but across the country in various industries, are calling out for fairer pay in a cost of living crisis, where people are living in poverty and increasingly accessing food banks, we should not just be undermining workers’ voices. We should be tackling the problem, lifting people out of poverty and paying them a fair wage.
The same goes for universities: we need to radically look again at higher education specifically. We would not be getting into these situations if it was not for this failed marketised project that has happened in higher education. We need to rethink how we fund higher education. We need to make it sustainable. I believe it should be publicly funded. We have spoken to students across the country for the next general election, and they agree that it should be publicly funded, without fees. It should be accessible, and something that all of society and the public have investment in it to better our society and invest in the future of this country.
Q65 Chair: So it continues to be the view of the NUS that higher education should be publicly funded and that those who have not benefited from it or do not benefit from it should pay through their taxes for higher education.
Chloe Field: Yes. I think it should be a public service, like a lot of other things.
Q66 Chair: Joe, a final word?
Joe Hill: If you are looking for action from the Department for Education, a consultation on the future of higher education funding rather than minimum service levels would be a much more productive use of its time. Universities struggle with the same lack of increases in funding as students do. No one in the sector is happy with it.
Chair: The overall funding for the university sector is certainly something that is of interest to the Committee, and we shall continue to look at that.
I am grateful for those contributions. Thank you for your evidence.
Witnesses: Raj Jethwa, Jo Grady and David Smy.
Q67 Chair: On our second panel, we have Raj Jethwa, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association—there is variation in how UCEA is pronounced, Raj, but you can probably tell us which is right; Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union; and David Smy, deputy director of enabling regulation at the Office for Students.
Thank you for coming today. I think you have probably all heard quite a lot of what the last panel said. I want other Members to lead in this session, but I will start by asking each of you for your assessment of the scale of industrial action since 2021, including last summer’s boycott, and the length and depth of that impact on students. Can I start with you, Raj?
Raj Jethwa: It is fair to say that there are two perspectives on this. There are the facts on the ground in terms of the actual impact, but there is also the perception and anxiety as well. We are all completely alive to the anxiety students will have felt about what the impact of the marking and assessment boycott might be for them.
We have data which we can share with the Committee that goes back to 2021—some of it is in our submission, and some of it we can provide afterwards. The actual impact in terms of days lost to strike action is low in the sector, and the participation by lecturers in strike action is also low in the sector, but if you are a student affected by that action, that is of little comfort to you. Therefore, we can provide that information, but we are aware of the fact that it is not scale that matters, it is the impact on individual students.
The boycott had a wider impact as well. As you heard from the previous session, we did our best in UCEA to try and present the accurate picture of the impact, but the reporting is fairly sensational. You might think that you were affected as a student even if, in the final analysis, you were not affected. That is our sense of it, but overall, our view is that over the last few years, while there have been successive periods of industrial action in the sector, the overall impact in terms of teaching loss has been low.
Q68 Chair: Jo, do you agree with that assessment?
Jo Grady: I think what is interesting about Raj’s response to you is that we have just sat for an hour listening to the panel asking students questions and students confirming that disruption and the distress. What you have just seen is part of the response that we got during the dispute—a focus more on trying to pivot away from the real impact than on resolving it. The way in which industrial action is regulated in the UK means that you have to give a lot of notice. The employer knew, for getting on for a year, that we were likely to have a marking and assessment boycott. Students understandably expected a resolution before we got to the issue, and what we saw was that kind of response.
While we could have been negotiating a settlement, we had university bosses taking a hammer to academic standards—which they did—and we had employers egged on and instructed by UCEA to punish staff at disproportionate levels for taking lawful, democratically mandated industrial action. As we heard from everybody on the previous panel, staff and students are being failed by this.
Q69 Chair: In your assessment, do you think the approach to negotiations prolonged the impact of the action?
Jo Grady: Yes, 100%. Can I give you a timeline? In May last year—the bank holiday—our members voted to ballot on this issue. We had to serve notice of that ballot in August 2022, and that ballot concluded in October-November. At this time, UCEA were aware that this could result in action, and potentially a marking and assessment boycott. It took until January to get any kind of offer from UCEA, which members of all unions—not just UCU—said was not substantial. Crucially, the offer also did not impact on the three non-pay related issues: workload, casualisation and equality pay gaps.
We paused our industrial action to go to ACAS to try and get a negotiated settlement with UCEA. During that time, they enforced an offer on members that they had voted down. I am going to erase some of the detail, because I would be here all day, but let me take you to the summer after the marking boycott started. I was mandated by my members to go to UCEA to try to seek an interim deal, which would mean that work for vulnerable students such as postgraduates and other cohorts would be fast-tracked and marked. All we were asking for to get this interim agreement was that things like the very punitive and unfair marking deductions were returned—we were not asking for a full settlement at that time—and UCEA did not budge a single inch. It was a real problem.
Q70 Chair: Raj, obviously the objective of this inquiry is to focus on the impact on students, rather than to look at all the issues around the dispute. But in terms of the issues around the timeline, the level of engagement and when offers were made, are there lessons learned from this that you think could be managed more effectively in the future?
Raj Jethwa: I would like to reply to those points, because I disagree with the timeline that Jo Grady has just set out. The employers went to the unions in autumn last year, because we recognised the cost of living pressures on staff. It was our proposal to the unions to bring the pay round forward, to reach an agreement on varying the timeline for the negotiations and to split the pay round into two parts, addressing pay first of all and non-pay issues after that. We did that before we even had a claim from the unions. We did it within the affordability of the institutions themselves.
When we could not reach an agreement on pay, we both accepted an offer from ACAS to go into conciliation. We spent a month in that. That process led to an impasse on pay. At that point, UCU stood down its strike action on the agreement that we would continue to have talks about non-pay issues. That process led to the agreement at ACAS to four terms of reference for further negotiations. They were agreed at ACAS but ultimately rejected by UCU, despite the agreement of all the union negotiators in that process.
Q71 Chair: We have two very different accounts of the issues, and we are not going to have time in the inquiry to go into them in full. May I come to David on the impact on students? You are there at the Office for Students, and you have to be able to look at this with a dispassionate eye as the regulator. What is your assessment of the impact of this and whether universities are doing enough to mitigate it? We have heard about complaints processes. We have heard about some students getting compensation payments. As the Office for Students, do you feel that the response has been sufficient?
David Smy: You are absolutely right: our perspective on this is focused on the students rather than all the other issues, linked though they are. I would echo a lot of what the previous panel said. There has been an ongoing issue, so it is not a one-off, but the marking and assessment boycott last year was clearly the most significant in terms of the number of universities affected and, therefore, the scale of students affected.
There clearly was significant impact in terms of measurable things, such as getting your results late or getting a pass mark—only an ordinary mark—rather than the full classification straight away. But I also think that what other people have said is right: the impact in terms of anxiety and uncertainty for students is significant, too. When we think about this, we have to be thinking about the number of years you spend at university. This is a group that was affected by various industrial action but also by the pandemic, so it is particularly hard on them and there is a level of uncertainty. What is a normal university experience like? What is a normal year like?
In terms of what providers did, different universities were affected to different extents, as we have heard. They took different approaches to mitigation and in how they are approaching it now. Some of them did that better than others. In some cases, that is because their systems gave them more flexibility and more room to do the things they wanted. Some universities were quite creative in terms of what they did about engaging with employers to try to make it possible for final-year students to go through.
We would always push universities to do more, and that is what we do whenever there is industrial action: we engage with the universities involved and make it clear what we expect of them and what we expect them to achieve. A lot of work was put in, but there is no doubt that there was a significant impact on students.
Q72 Chair: You have been very clear, and I think we heard from the previous panel as well, about the differential impact and some universities being able to do more. Are there any examples of universities that you think failed in their duty to students in terms of the approach they took in this space, and which significantly missed out on providing support that they could have done?
David Smy: I am not going to name universities unless we have got to a point at which we have made a proper judgment, by looking at all the evidence of an individual case, and decided it was appropriate to publish that. There are a few universities that we are still engaging with to understand what they did during the process and whether we have concerns about that. Obviously, I cannot get into naming names.
Q73 Caroline Ansell: I wonder if I might focus on particular groups, because I think there has been some difference of opinion around the impact. Are there specific groups that you have been most concerned about because they have felt the impact more seriously?
Jo Grady: Yes. As I said before, one of the reasons that we attempted to seek an interim agreement with UCEA was that we were very aware of the impact that this would have on international students, particularly on final-year students and those such as social work students, who move into employment quite rapidly. Yes, that was clear.
David Smy: I would agree with that. There clearly are concerns beyond just, “Is there a strike going on?” The industrial action will affect some people more than others, so I completely agree. We have definitely focused on final-year students, and I mentioned before some of the engagement with employers about what is done for final-year students and their particular circumstances, such as different professional circumstances. For example, it can be difficult where people go on to certain professional routes, or around the visa requirements for international students. I think there are different groups of students more affected than others.
Raj Jethwa: I would echo that. It is exactly those groups: final-year students, international students, and postgraduates as well. This was a focus for institutions throughout the dispute. They are the ones that have received a disproportionate profile in terms of the visibility of the issues affecting them. There are things that the sector did. We particularly worked with Universities UK to ensure that the Home Office was doing what it could, for example, for international students on tier 4 visas. There are lots of examples of individual institutions intervening on behalf of hundreds of students in individual cases to ensure that they were protected in those circumstances.
The interim agreement that Jo Grady mentioned was a proposal that came to us at the end of June, after two or three months of a boycott. We spent a month in talks with the UCU, but their focus was not on trying to repay the withheld pay but on trying to make substantive movement on the substance of the dispute itself.
Q74 Caroline Ansell: I should probably have said at the outset that I had some particularly difficult casework as an MP on exactly this issue—final-year students, particularly those in occupation-related degrees, not being able to graduate. I have very much seen the impact. Also, as a parent with a child going through university right now, I have seen it there. I hope that we will never be in that place again around the marking and assessment boycott.
Having identified these groups then, have you also identified ways in which this action might be mitigated, or what safeguarding there might be for these particular groups? I would then like to finish with one wider question around the impact more generally. I am thinking about the particular groups and the particular impact of the marking and assessment boycott, which meant that some students could not graduate in some cases. Is there any future safeguarding around this as a result of this experience?
Raj Jethwa: This has been a real focus for us. Our role is to be the employers association, but you cannot help but be mindful of the direct impact on students of this form of industrial action. We were talking to institutions all the way through the dispute. We would meet with hundreds of institutions every week and we had regular communications to understand the impact on students and what we could do to support universities during the dispute. At the end of the dispute, we did our own survey of institutions to understand not only what safeguards they were able to put in place but what practice we can put in place to help institutions—
Caroline Ansell: This is particularly around marking and assessment.
Raj Jethwa: Yes, on the marking and assessment boycott, and particularly for those groups of students directly affected, which you mentioned. We also have a conference with the universities on Thursday where we will be looking specifically at lessons to be learned.
Q75 Caroline Ansell: This is future work?
Raj Jethwa: Yes, future work.
Q76 Caroline Ansell: Okay, so it is still to come. David?
David Smy: A lot of the things that would be most effective for those students are relevant to students more widely. It is partially about simply a focus on them, and when we wrote to providers, we emphasised groups of students who were particularly affected, and particularly final-year students. There is more engagement that we can do with that.
I mentioned before that some universities were in a better position to deal with it. It is about looking at the systems that universities use for marking and ensuring that they do not have things in them that are inflexible in a way that is not necessary to maintain standards but makes it difficult to react. I think a lot of universities had already addressed that during the pandemic, but there is room for them—
Q77 Caroline Ansell: So they actually changed the means of assessment in order to bypass this.
David Smy: Some of them created more room. Our approach here is that it is difficult—I like to emphasise that. That is why we want to emphasise it, because we needed to say to universities, “Stop disadvantage and delay, but do not do it by not meeting your requirements on standards.” It is about ensuring that you have a proper, robust system that is flexible for things such as covid, but that that flexibility is useful in these sorts of circumstances.
Jo Grady: I am afraid that I have not really seen much evidence that we could not end up in a situation like this again, if I am honest. One of the issues around mitigations—I understand your question, and I will answer it—is that the biggest safeguarding we can have, particularly for international students who pay a lot of money to come and study here, is to make sure that the employment conditions in universities are as first rate as our reputation globally. We are currently asking staff to work on Deliveroo-type contracts. We have 90,000 insecure contracts in higher education. A third of teaching is done, in some of our most—
Q78 Caroline Ansell: That is about the wider picture, rather than being specific to this. There will be further opportunities for that later in the session; I do not want to encroach on other lines of inquiry. That was the specific, but is there one overarching means by which you seek to mitigate the impact on students? I understand that this is very much a work in progress and the question was focused, but is there one in particular, granted that it will be about the bigger picture and the working conditions?
David Smy: For us, and I think other witnesses alluded to this, all we can do and what we do do is engage with the providers, make clear what the regulatory expectations are in the interests of students and hold them to that. I do not think that there is a magic bullet we can use to address these issues: it is simply a question of keeping on top of that.
Q79 Caroline Ansell: Does it mean that the impact on students that we are learning about here is acceptable? Is that the price that is paid for that free and democratic right to strike? Is that where we are landing?
David Smy: The nature of the democratic right to strike is well beyond my remit in the Office for Students. I am taking the legal framework that exists and trying to work out how we mitigate things for students within that.
Raj Jethwa: I believe in the right to take industrial action, but there is a price that is unacceptable, and that was the price that students paid during this form of industrial action. There is almost any form of action that you can take short of a strike in universities, and UCU could have chosen other tactics. It could have chosen to boycott research activities or external conferences. The impact here was too high. Even if it was only a small number of students, we have heard about the anxiety that they felt.
We are looking at two focuses for the future. One is obvious: we need to reset industrial relations in the sector, and we are dedicated to doing that. We are still meeting with the unions to talk about ways in which we can make progress on those issues that came out of last year’s dispute. A large number of institutions were not affected by the industrial action, but some institutions were. We are doing our best to spread the practice that was affecting those institutions. It could be around regulatory change, having systems in place or having alternative proposals to deal with shortfalls in marking. Those are just a few examples, but those are definitely the tools that we are putting in place for if we are ever again in the unfortunate situation of having a marking and assessment boycott, which I really hope we will not be.
Jo Grady: There are two things. In honesty, Raj, you do not sound like a man dedicated to resetting industrial relations. On the punitive pay deductions—100% of your salary for potentially not doing 5% of your workload—UCEA has not said that it will not do that again. That poured fuel on a fire.
In terms of solutions and ultimate mitigations, obviously there is resolving the underlying issues, which means—here is one for the DfE; someone in the previous panel spoke about this—a proper review of funding. The volatility injected into higher education by a funding model that requires universities to try to attract students in the way that they do is corrosive. There are things like a multi-year pay deal with proper security for staff and a system that does not tell universities to punish them—to “cause pain”, which is one of the quotations we have from a vice-chancellor—during industrial action. Of course that will make things 100 times worse.
Chair: We have heard criticism of tactics on both sides. At the end of the day, we want to focus on the impact on students. I absolutely get the point that we would all like to see a situation in which this kind of strike action is not necessary in the future. There are wider issues at play to resolve that, which the Committee will take seriously.
Q80 Ian Mearns: Given the wide variations in the impact of the marking and assessment boycott within and across universities, what steps can your organisations take to minimise that variation during future potential industrial action?
Raj Jethwa: I think I have already spoken about that, but I will expand on it. We are trying to understand what was effective in institutions that managed to avoid any widespread impact of the boycott and to make sure that other institutions can learn from that.
Most institutions were barely affected by the marking and assessment boycott, and several factors were relevant to that. We know that subject and discipline is a factor. It could be that in some institutions the boycott had a more disproportionate impact because of the timing of exams and the emphasis on final-year projects and final examinations. Optionality in courses is a factor as well; it only takes one or two individuals to be involved in the boycott, but their papers are used across courses, and we saw examples of that. The stance that the local branch took was a factor as well.
Any of those four factors coming together could have had a certain impact, but it is clear that where they were all at play, the boycott would have had a significantly higher impact. We are making sure that institutions understand what worked well and what they can do to safeguard students if we are ever again in a situation where we face a boycott.
Our focus is really on trying to get over this. Students have had a very hard time in the last 12 months because of the boycott, but that was not because employers were not sympathetic to the plight of staff. We opened the pay round early because we were determined to try to bring relief to staff facing high inflationary expectations—particularly those on the lowest incomes—to make sure that they had an early settlement and an interim payment. Despite that, we still ended up with a boycott.
The sector’s affordability is constrained at the moment; every week, in Times Higher Education or any other publication, you will see a story about universities struggling financially. In that context, we are still trying our best to support staff and students.
Q81 Ian Mearns: I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you represent a membership organisation, within which there are various strands of opinion about the management of the dispute from the employers’ perspective. I have sat on employers’ side negotiating bodies in local government for years; it sounds to me as if you are representing one particular end of the spectrum of those various opinions about the management of the dispute. That is how it sounds; you do not seem to be representing the views of the universities who want a much earlier settlement.
Raj Jethwa: If I can respond to that, throughout the dispute, I met with universities on a weekly basis. We were always taking the pulse of the sector. We did nothing without a mandate from employers, but we could do nothing more within the constraints of the sector.
We regularly tested opinion. I had regular conversations with the unions, formally and informally, and we tried to be creative and find options that we thought might lead to a resolution and settlement. We constantly took that back to our employers—to vice-chancellors and HR directors—across the sector. During covid, we could meet regularly on Teams with large numbers of people, so we regularly took the opinions of the sector to make sure that we were representing it faithfully in our discussions with the unions.
Q82 Ian Mearns: You are the representative of the group. In those weekly meetings with the universities, did you counsel the university representatives not to make publicly inflammatory statements that would worsen the dispute? That happened quite a lot.
Raj Jethwa: We gave out advice about communications, but it is for institutions to determine communications for themselves. We asked for two things—for institutions not to give out messages that might provoke or make the situation more inflammatory, as you said, and for them not to enter into statements that would depart from the collective employer position. We were very clear on both lines.
Q83 Chair: On that point, universities are obviously autonomous institutions, and you have talked about those with better relations with their local branches. That should be a good thing and enable a constructive approach to happen. Why was Queen’s University Belfast ejected from UCEA after coming to an agreement with its UCU branch, which was described by the organisation as “an extremely serious matter”? Surely that should have been seen as welcome engagement that was helping to move the situation forward. If we think about the impact on students, their students were reassured and benefited from the fact that they had reached agreement.
Raj Jethwa: I can explain. As you say, each university is an individual autonomous employer; their staff’s conditions and pay are directly their responsibility. Every year in the negotiations, UCEA seeks a mandate from those employers. They sign up for that year to opt into collective pay bargaining. In doing so, they sign up to a code and they agree to abide by the outcome of that collective pay process. If you believe in sector-level collective pay bargaining, you have to have that agreement. At the end of the process, what we say to employers is, “You will abide by the pay recommendations we set out.” If you do not have confidence in the process, you have no confidence in the collective bargaining, and there is a real risk of fragmentation of collective pay bargaining.
It is unfortunate what Queen’s did, and I understand the situation they were in. Any other aspect of their conditions of service would have been in their gift to try to determine locally. But to step outside the pay process and the mandate we had, and to agree to a consolidated pay uplift outside that, meant they were outside the UCEA code. We made that decision reluctantly, but there was unanimity on the UCEA board and among our membership that they had breached the good-faith process that employers enter into when they sign up to collective bargaining through UCEA.
Q84 Chair: On what happens next on that front, is that a permanent situation whereby they are left outside the process and have to negotiate for themselves, or is there an opportunity to re-engage? Are there lessons to be learned? If we value the autonomy of universities, surely we should value their autonomy to have better industrial relations in this space.
Raj Jethwa: Their membership has been terminated for a period of three years, but there will be ongoing conversations. We do not want this to be a permanent outcome, because it does not do well for the collectivity of the sector. But beyond that—
Q85 Ian Mearns: Honestly, it just does not sound like rational behaviour by a national employers’ organisation to be expelling individual members for three years. You can have a difference of opinion, and the majority will prevail, but to eject an organisation like that for three years sounds like a punitive measure.
Raj Jethwa: We have 170 members. Only about 143 of them take part in collective pay bargaining every year. You can be a member of UCEA and not sign up to the collective pay bargaining process, but if you choose to sign up to the collective pay bargaining, there are rights and responsibilities that go with it. We did not make that decision lightly—we understood the gravity of the decision we were making—but we were doing it to preserve the collective bargaining process.
Q86 Chair: Jo, you are on the other side of that collective bargaining process. What was UCU’s view of what happened at Queen’s?
Jo Grady: I actually think that anyone with fresh ears who is listening to this has perhaps got a flavour of some of the frustrations that UCU has had. I promise that I will come to Queen Mary’s, but it is quite clear from what Raj has said that either the sector did not want to resolve it or UCEA lacked the leadership to take them in that direction. I said earlier that a vice-chancellor had said that they wanted their staff to feel pain. That was actually the chair of UCEA. The direction of travel was around not being able to find creative solutions to the dispute because of its bureaucratic nature. With regard to Queen Mary’s, we did not follow UCEA’s line; we did not eject them from our grouping or impose any punitive sanction.
Chair: You mean Queen’s University Belfast.
Jo Grady: Sorry. We did not engage in that. I would just say one thing: as a union, we want everyone to benefit from a collective solution, which is why we did seek agreements during this period. Our members were working very hard in universities, and these are just some: Sussex, Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast, Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh, Exeter, York, Bristol and Heriot-Watt. There were other universities that did not go public because they knew that they would face a sanction or at least would not be happy with what UCEA had done.
We were working very hard with student unions and universities to put pressure on UCEA to take them in the direction that we needed to go in. But I think you heard it from Raj: there just doesn’t feel like there was a genuine effort from UCEA to bring the sector one way, and there was just an acceptance that the sector didn’t want to solve the dispute. It would rather prepare for a really damaging marking and assessment boycott by bringing in mitigations that impacted academic standards or attempt to intimidate its staff into not doing it by bringing in what, by anybody’s measure, were pay deductions that you either agree were not fair or were clearly going to inflame the situation.
Q87 Chair: In terms of resolving the dispute, how important was it that those issues were taken off the table?
Jo Grady: Once UCEA and the sector allowed the marking and assessment boycott to be triggered, which, as I say, was on the cards from October onwards and was eventually triggered in April, we put forward an interim proposal with some solutions. Part of that, in cases where there had been really punitive deductions—for example, if 5% of your workload is marking but you have lost 100% of your pay—was saying, “If you want people to bust a gut and, over the course of two or three weeks, do nothing but marking to make sure that graduations stay on track and that people get placements, you are going to have to put something on the table that shows them you are serious.”
The bare minimum was a commitment, to say, “While you are having to do this marking and we are all having to pull together and reset, you could commit to doing that,” and they couldn’t commit to doing that. That was really the biggest indication that employers had just dug in, put their heads down and were willing to ride out a marking and assessment boycott and everything that came with it.
Raj Jethwa: I have to take issue with what I am hearing here. That is a completely unfair characterisation. I keep hearing that UCU put forward attempts to resolve this, but that completely neglects the fact that we spend a month in ACAS leading up to the terms of reference. We went through seven iterations of those, and that was based on UCEA showing leadership and getting employers to agree that we would take that work forward.
We had an agreement through ACAS, which was taken back to UCU. In fairness to Jo Grady, she signed up to that in ACAS—all our unions did—but the higher education committee initially wouldn’t even put it to its members to vote on. When eventually it did, it gave its members only two options: to note or to reject, not to accept. That is not bargaining in good faith.
Chair: Okay. As I say, we are not going to go into all the detail of this again—
Jo Grady: If you want to understand, we had at the time two employer bodies in higher education: UUK and UCEA. The deal that we struck with UUK was accepted by 97% of members. The vote for UCEA’s offer didn’t hit the 50% for people to accept it, so I urge you to think about what was happening in one set of negotiations and why they were so difficult, and what was happening in the other.
Chair: Sure, but at the end of the day we eventually got to a position whereby the dispute is now over—it is behind us. I guess what we are keen to know is what can be learned in terms of the tactics to make sure that we don’t get into such a severe dispute again and don’t have those issues. The balance between the collective bargaining positions and the autonomy of the universities to address these issues themselves is important in that respect. I am going to come to Andrew, who has some further questions.
Q88 Andrew Lewer: I want to turn to the impact on students. You have already touched upon this a bit severally, but I am interested in what discussions you had with universities during the marking and assessment boycott to try to alleviate the negative impact on students. Would you like to highlight any best practice from any particular university to reduce the impact?
Raj Jethwa: As I said, we spoke to universities throughout the dispute. We were speaking to universities every week to understand what measures they were putting in place to try to deal with the boycott and protect students. We did a survey, and we have a further conference this week in which we will be collecting examples of good practice. I would be happy to share a memo with the Committee afterwards with the best examples we found.
All through the dispute, we were aware that universities were taking different steps and learning from each other about what was working and what issues were coming up that they had to deal with. We worked very quickly with universities to try to give them advice, guidance and information to help them understand how they could have made sure students were protected during the boycott.
David Smy: We engaged with different providers at different levels—so we wrote to all providers involved at a high level to say, “These are the things we think we need to focus on. These are the main areas we think are at risk. This is what we expect of you.” We engage more, in this case and other cases of industrial action, with particular providers where there are particular problems. We will get into discussions with them on which groups of students are most affected. What are they doing, for instance, about final-year students—that we were talking about before—or international students? Where are the vulnerabilities? I think we would encourage that sort of good practice being spread.
I don’t think it’s something where it’s the same for everyone. I don’t think it’s something where, as a regulator, we are going to say that every university “must” do this thing, because it will vary. But we would look to sector bodies to, yes, spread that good practice and to make sure that they all can mitigate problems. We would look to other universities in the future, in the same way as we did see—obviously, the independent adjudicator said, too, that they saw some things that had improved at some universities from previous industrial action. I think that if there has been good practice this time around, we would in the future expect other providers to do similar things.
Jo Grady: From our perspective, part of the influence we were trying to have was about working with students and working with universities that were amenable to finding a solution, to put pressure on UCEA. We were concerned at the time, and remain so, that some of the rushed mitigations have been detrimental to academic standards. We are concerned about the long-term consequences in terms of whether or not employers keep them in place.
In terms of one-to-one support, I think you will struggle to find a UCU member who was involved in industrial action or the marking and assessment boycott and who was not maintaining personal contact and providing personal support to their students, even though they were not engaged in work activities necessarily. That will really be the extent of—
Q89 Andrew Lewer: How can a lecturer provide support to a student at the same time as saying that they are not going to mark their papers?
Jo Grady: Grading is one aspect of the workload, for those of you coming along here today, but it would not be everything else that you do. There are multiple ways in which, in a university setting, staff would still be involved in teaching their students and, potentially, seeing them in office hours; they are just not engaging in that one aspect.
If we think particularly about third-year students, they will have spent the last 10 months doing a research dissertation on a specialism with their supervisor. I think one of the reasons why so many people on this panel were trying to articulate the fact that, despite suffering a penalty, students were very supportive is that students understood the consequences if you have your expert dissertation marked by a non-expert who is not employed by the university. They understand the long-term consequences in terms of what that means for students in general and what that means for them.
Q90 Andrew Lewer: The short-term consequence is that they need to get a job and they haven’t got their papers marked to be able to get one.
Jo Grady: Of course, but what I am saying is that you have a group of students who, despite their own distress, were still capable of seeing the longer-term goal and the issue that needed fixing. Frankly, if more vice-chancellors and more people who were in positions of authority and influence to resolve the dispute had been as attuned and nuanced as students were, we would, I think, have got to a settlement much quicker, and potentially we could have avoided the marking boycott entirely.
Q91 Andrew Lewer: Did it cause, in the union, some concern that it was taking advantage of the ideological fervour of some students, even though those students are more vulnerable, less well paid and in a more difficult situation than UCU members?
Jo Grady: I am not suggesting that you are saying this, but when I hear people say that students are malleable and you can influence them, I say that you have never been in front of a classroom full of students. They have their own minds. They do reading. I would say that if a student happens to agree with you, it is because they share that point of view, not because you are a manipulator.
Q92 Andrew Lewer: I am suggesting that some of them take that view and the UCU—did it or did it not consider that it was taking advantage of their views even though they would be suffering disproportionately?
Jo Grady: I think you and I do not share a common position on that. Students live in households. They probably have a zero-hour contract themselves. They know what it is like to be on the receiving end of gig economy working practices. I think it is a certain framing to suggest that they are being taken advantage of if they happen to have views that are aligned with those of people who are taking action.
Students have become, because of the policies of the UK on higher education, a site of value extraction and exploitation, in terms of the money that they have to pay. We were hearing earlier about the decreasing access to mental health provision that has happened in universities despite there being an explosion of mental health problems. There are rip-off landlords. Everybody is trying to get a piece of students, so they understand unfairness and injustice potentially better than any group of people I have ever come across.
Q93 Andrew Lewer: Looking at the Office for Students, the recent report by the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee has suggested that it would be useful for the Office for Students to clarify the rights of students during industrial action. What is the OfS going to do to ensure that students have a clear understanding of their rights during industrial action periods and that those rights are protected?
David Smy: For some time now, we have published and highlighted information for students about the rights of students. As I think was said on the previous panel, there are other routes that students go down to find that as well, so I am not saying it is the main thing that everyone will click on, but we put that out and we updated it when the industrial action came round.
We have requirements on providers around consumer rights. There is a live question that we are considering at the moment, including in response to the House of Lords, about the more detailed, sector-specific consumer law issues that the CMA looked at some time ago now and whether it will be useful to provide more clarity and unpacking in terms of what consumer rights mean in this pretty unusual sector, and to give more certainty to both students and providers about what we are expected to do.
Q94 Andrew Lewer: The OfS came into existence right at the end of the nine years that I spent as a university governor. At that point there was a bit of a lack of clarity about its role versus HEFCE, which it took over from. There is still a little bit of that from the previous role. Do you see that as just a natural corollary of the different role that OfS has, or are there more opportunities for people to have a greater understanding, with a greater role for you in these sorts of issues?
David Smy: I do not think that we are set up so that, as the first thing when a student is worried about what is going on with a marking and assessment boycott, they approach us before they approach the student union, the provider or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, which looks at direct complaints. I do not think we are trying to muscle in and be an immediate one-stop shop for everything.
Having said that, we are committed to doing more work around student engagement. Some of that is awareness raising. Probably more of it is about making sure that we are finding more creative ways to bring in our understanding of what students care about and are most worried about with all sorts of things, including this, and using that to inform our work. We want people to know that they can raise complaints and flag regulatory issues with us. It is useful for us if people know what we are for and can engage with us, but I think we are more concerned about the student engagement that helps to inform our work and policy.
Q95 Andrew Lewer: Do you have any views on the OfS’s role during the dispute, Jo?
Jo Grady: With all respect, I think UCU members and staff more broadly are probably confused about the role and the need for the OfS. If there is not a role for it to step in at moments like this, what is the purpose of it? There is a lot of money funnelled into the OfS. There is a lot of money funnelled into all manner of things that staff do not think produce a lot of value, and which could be redistributed on more education and student-facing things.
Andrew Lewer: It is not a huge budget, to be honest, but I get what you say. Raj?
Raj Jethwa: OfS clarified the responsibility of institutions during the dispute, and they were very mindful of that. We had several focuses— obviously trying to continue to find a way to resolve the dispute, but also trying to make sure that students were protected. Institutions were mindful of the guidance from the OfS and the CMA in terms of students’ rights during the process. That very much weighed on the minds of institutions, as well as the purely human approach of worrying about students and making sure they were protected.
Q96 Chair: On the question of compensation, we heard from the previous panel that some universities have been offering £500 to people whose graduations were delayed. There is a concern that only those people who complain and go through the official complaints process get that support, whereas others who might in some ways be more disadvantaged are less likely to come forward and complain. Is that something that the OfS as a regulator would look into, to ensure that if there is compensation in these cases it is handled consistently?
David Smy: That is a really important question. Part of what we would expect is for universities and colleges to be clear what their policies are on refunds and compensation. That comes up in this context, but also in other contexts where campuses are being closed or other disruption is happening.
We want policies to be clear, but we do not mandate which individual is being paid which amount of money. It is not at that level; it is, “Do you have appropriate policies that mean that you are approaching it in a fair way?” That is the sort of thing we might look at. I was talking earlier about looking more at sector-specific consumer protection law and what that means. I think it is an important question.
Q97 Chair: But if some universities are taking that approach and others are following by saying, “This is what we consider a reasonable recompense for the fact that your graduation was delayed,” surely there should be some concern about those who are not, and about those who might have missed out because they did not make complaints.
David Smy: Our experience from our engagement with providers and the reportable events that we got from different universities about this is that there is not very often a complete like-with-like. I would be slightly cautious, because you might have two students for whom it took the same amount of time to get their final degree. One might have got a degree without classification earlier and might have had support from their employer, while the other did not get any of those things, so their need for compensation is more acute. I would be a little bit careful about that, but it is worth taking away and looking at.
Q98 Ian Mearns: As the regulator, if the Office for Students comes across a case in which an individual student has been through a complaints process and been compensated, should it not say to the university that all other students in the same category should also be compensated?
David Smy: If you have a situation in which an individual student had a complaint and was compensated for something, I am not certain, but I think that that would tend to come into the judgment of the complaint. Certainly, if people like the Office of the Independent Adjudicator got involved, I think they would give a steer, not just in the case, that said, “You need to ensure that you do this policy in a more consistent way.”
Yes, it is something we would take an interest in, if they were being inconsistent. We expect providers to have policies and comply with them in a consistent way.
Q99 Ian Mearns: It may well be that you get a situation where the sharp-elbowed individual gets the compensation, while people who have been equally badly or inadequately dealt with have and who have received exactly the same damage, but have not made a formal complaint, are not getting anything. As the OfS, you could be saying to individual universities, “If you paid compensation in that case, are there any other students who have the same sort of damage but have not made a formal complaint?” I don’t know, but it is something to think about looking at.
David Smy: Absolutely.
Q100 Ian Mearns: How would you assess the mitigation steps taken by the Government during the marking and assessment boycott, such as temporary grade exemptions for the graduate visa route and initial teacher training, as well as extending the civil service graduate scheme application window? Do you think those mitigations had any particular effect?
David Smy: We welcome anything that mitigates things for students. I have not made an assessment of the impact of those particular measures or others. We are always looking for Government, employers, unions and professional bodies involved with these groups to do what they can in those situations.
Q101 Ian Mearns: Let us hope that we do not see the need for such industrial action in future. If it were to occur in future, is there anything else you would like to see from the Department for Education to minimise the impact on students?
David Smy: I do not want, as an arm’s length body, to go back to the Department and say what it ought to be doing. That is a governmental and political question.
Ian Mearns: You could make helpful suggestions.
David Smy: We might. We talk to civil servants in relevant areas and so on, but I do not want to stand here and start lobbying for certain Government interventions; I do not think it would be helpful. Whatever the Government do—I do not think that what I say here will have a massive effect on that—we want to be in a position to work most effectively within that framework.
Q102 Ian Mearns: But you are the Office for Students. You could make recommendations to the Government about what they could do to minimise the impact on students. Come on—let’s have a think about that.
David Smy: We talk to the Government. We share our experience of things: what we have seen going well and badly. What we do not routinely do is to set out our own manifesto for these things. I do not think that that would be the most helpful way for us to engage as a regulator. That does not mean that we don’t share intelligence and thoughts with Government.
Q103 Ian Mearns: In October last year, the Department for Education launched a consultation on introducing minimum service levels in universities. How workable is the whole concept of minimum service levels in higher education? What is your response to that? Do you think that that would be beneficial to students in any way? That question is for everyone.
Jo Grady: As people who are all here because we care about education, we need to ask ourselves a question: do we want to address the issues that have meant industrial action has been an annual event in higher education, or do we want to try to find technical fixes, rules and procedures that do not address the issue? That hits at the heart of it.
A number of employers will not want to touch minimum service levels, but there might be some more hawkish employers who think that they would be good. Ultimately, I think that they are destined to be futile if we do not address the issues that make people leave the sector.
I asked some of our members to give me case studies. I will give you one of them: “I have been working at the University of Birmingham as a research fellow since February 2008”—that is 16 years. “However, I still have been employed on fixed-term contracts”. That is really common. We need to ask ourselves why we have a funding model that chews students up and spits them out, and makes staff the shock absorbers of a system that isn’t working.
This is the big reveal: I am not a fan of minimum service levels. That is probably not a surprise. They are unworkable on their own logic, in most sectors, and definitely will not resolve anything in higher education.
Q104 Ian Mearns: Any view on minimum service levels, David?
David Smy: This will probably be unsurprising, too: if I am not going to give suggestions, I am not going to commentate on Government proposals. I think that is a question for the Government and Parliament.
Q105 Ian Mearns: Raj, are you an employer hawk or a dove on minimum service levels?
Raj Jethwa: Jo and I probably agree on much of this. I understand where the proposals are coming from and the intent behind them. You asked this question of OfS, but we spoke to DfE constantly throughout the dispute to give it information and data about the impact, and we know that they paid a great deal of attention to what was going on. We know where the proposals are coming from in terms of wanting to reduce the impact of industrial action on students.
There are practical considerations and fundamental considerations in relation to this issue. It is hard to know exactly how MSLs might work in practice in higher education. Also, given the role that OfS and the CMA guidance play, this may put institutions in a very invidious situation whereby they feel that they have to make use of this particular proposal, when the effect might actually be to damage local industrial relations. Institutions will be very concerned about having to use this power and to serve a work notice.
Fundamentally, I am still essentially a voluntarist when it comes to industrial relations. We are a body that represents individual, autonomous employers. Where we can work with unions, we do; where we disagree, we try to resolve it. This year, the unions’ pay claim was for 15%, as opposed to what was in our ability to pay, which was to 5% to 8%. On all the other issues—workload, contract types, pay gaps and the pay spine—we were prepared to enter into further negotiations. It is disappointing that we got to the marking and assessment boycott.
That substance aside, however, during the pandemic we worked with the unions to have agreements on vaccinations, testing and safe return to campus—issues that were important to students and staff alike. Where we can work with unions, we want to do so. To increase the ability of the state to try to prescribe that relationship in legislation may not always be helpful. I think the concern about MSLs is that they may be counterproductive in this context.
Ian Mearns: Thank you very much indeed.
Chair: That concludes the session. Thank you for your evidence today.