UCU win big for colleges across the country

Three days of University and College Union (UCU)-led strikes at colleges across the country came to a climactic finish today, 16 January.

The union staged walkouts on Wednesday 14 January, and on through Thursday and Friday. In total, staff at 17 colleges across England took part. The workers were taking a stand against further-education (FE) bosses’ latest inadequate offers on pay and working conditions.

The UCU capped off its industrial action with a national rally at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, which began at 12pm today, 16 January.

The colleges with staff who took part were:

Bournemouth and Poole College of FE
Capital City College
Chesterfield College
City College Norwich
City of Liverpool College
City of Portsmouth College
City of Wolverhampton College
Hugh Baird College
Isle of Wight College
Loughborough College Group
Morley College
SK College Group
South & City College Birmingham
South Bank Colleges
Truro & Penwith College
Windsor Forest Colleges Group
Working Men’s College

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said:

Industrial action is a last resort, but staff up and down England have been left with no choice. There is still time for colleges to make fair offers that help close the pay gap between school and college teachers.

Our demands are reasonable, and management at the 17 colleges where staff are taking action need to look at those that worked to settle their disputes. Employers must now agree to meaningful sectoral bargaining so further education can avoid the cycle of strike ballots and disruption that we have seen over the past few years.

Lancaster & Morecambe College

The first victory of the strike came from Lancaster & Morecambe College, on the very first day of the walkout. On 14 January, staff accepted an improved pay offer, bringing their part in the industrial action to an end.

Their new deal includes:

A 4% pay rise,
A starting salary of £30,366,
An additional spine point at the top of the pay scale, for a combined increase totalling 7.74%, and,
An agreement on workload protections including a reduction in annual teaching hours, additional of safety protections and prioritised time for planning and marking.

In response to the Lancaster & Morecambe win, Grady said:

I want to congratulate our members at Lancaster and Morecambe College for winning a pay award that helps bring their salaries into line with their counterparts in schools. It is down to the determination and incredible solidarity of our members which shows what can be achieved when workers unionise and stand together.

Sheffield College

Following hot on Lancaster & Morecambe’s heels, staff at Sheffield College accepted their pay deal on Thursday 15 January. The new offer included a 4% pay rise for all staff, and a 5% increase for lecturers and curriculum team leaders.

Staff at Sheffield college had already secured a below-inflation increase of 2% back in August 2025. On top of that, they’ve now won a 2% raise backdated to 1 December 2025 for all members of staff.

Lecturers on Level 1-5 scale points instead received a 3% increase, backdated to the same date. This was intended to address the decline in the value of the teaching staff’s pay at the college.

Beyond this, the UCU also secured a promise that the college would undertake further negotiations on its workload agreement.

Kirklees College

On the same day as Sheffield secured its victory, staff at Kirklees College also opted to accept a 4.5% pay offer. Like Sheffield and Lancaster & Morecambe before them, this decision also saw the Kirklees staff pull out of the nationwide strike action.

The 4.5% pay award applies to all staff at the college. It’s backdated to 1 March 2026, and will take full effect from 1 April 2026. On top of the 4.5%, lecturers on scale point 34 will receive a further 0.5% uplift.

Beyond that, the new deal from Kirklees College bosses also included:

Alignment with the Real Living Wage,
A commitment to further talks and improvements to the current workload agreement by April 2026,
Potential time off in lieu for extra demands on the college-workers’ time, including open days, parents’ evenings, and recruitment events.

A New Deal for Further Education

However, the union also has its eyes on a bigger prize beyond its current strikes.

The UCU has called for a New Deal for FE to fix the broken further education sector in England. Sister unions Unison, GMB, the National Education Union, and Unite have also backed the call, which includes:

A pay increase of 10%, or £3000,
A minimum starting salary of £30,000
Reform of the pay spine,
Closing gaps in pay equality,
National workload agreements,
A return to national bargaining, and
Putting FE at the heart of government plans.

Crucially, the unions’ demands also include pay parity between school and college teachers within 3 years. On average, teachers in schools earn £9,000 more than their counterparts in England’s colleges.

This week’s wins at Lancaster & Morecambe, Sheffield and Kirklees show that change really is possible through the power of collective bargaining and industrial action. Now, the UCU and its sister unions will look to turn local victories into national, lasting improvements for the ailing FE sector as a whole.

Featured image via the Canary

Tags: trade unions universities

Comments 1

Airlane1979 says:

5 months ago

It is misleading to portray this as any kind of victory for further education workers. The World Socialist Web Site describes this accurately:

“All but admitting that its strategy is based on pre-emptively accepting defeat, the UCU states baldly that the “central premise of a New Deal for FE is that UCU is not yet ready to achieve fundamental change at sector level and any precipitate move will most probably take the union and our strategic demands backwards rather than forward.”

This flies in the face of the guiding principle of the workers’ movement that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. The true “power reality” is that it is FE workers who are the lifeblood of the sector, and who have the power, precisely “at sector level”, through a unified struggle, to enforce their demands for decent terms of employment and a high quality of education.

The FE sector in the UK serves around 2 million students, with roughly 1.6 million in England alone. The total FE workforce in England including college, work-based, and adult learning providers is estimated at over 326,000. But this powerful force is paralysed by a union leadership opposed to a genuine struggle to win the many billions of pounds required to adequately fund the sector.

Further Education workers must take steps to bring the dispute under their direct control through rank-and-file committees at each college, whose first principles are: firstly, to fight for what workers need not what the college groups and government say they must accept; secondly, that the struggle must be waged on a unified basis among as wide a section of the workforce as possible.”

(‘Further Education workers strike 17 colleges in England as University and College Union stifles action’, WSWS 16th Jan 2026)