Friday 26th June HEC Report
The full, unconfirmed minutes of this meeting are available on the UCU website (login required). Therefore, in the interest of focus and brevity this report addresses the following three points:
- HEC adopts comprehensive HE Strategy
- HEC accepts recommendations of Secretary of State Dispute Working Group
- HEC response to HESC (Higher Education Sector Conference, part of annual UCU Congress) decisions.
- HE Strategy adopted
Members in HE have already received an update on the three-year HE strategy that was adopted by HEC at this meeting. The strategy was presented by vice president (and chair of HEC) Mark Pendleton, but is thoroughly grounded in policy established by sector conferences in recent years together with up-to-minute input from branch engagement meetings held across the four UK nations by the General Secretary and the then president-elect (Dyfrig Jones) following last autumn’s pay ballot.
UCU Commons members were among the roughly two thirds of HEC members to support this strategy. We can’t give an exhaustive account of why HEC members endorsed the strategy paper’s recommendations, but a few points are worth highlighting. The strategy is a holistic one in that it integrates different approaches to building UCU’s power to shape the future of the sector. This includes a much more concerted, serious and joined-up approach to political work, through both lobbying and building relationships and alliances across the sector. This approach is to be integrated with the union’s core organising and recruitment activity through, for example, the development of campaigning resources for (and with) branches and members. The strategy also aims to build effective inter-branch networks, and fully recognizes that ongoing local disputes are local expressions of sector-wide problems.
The strategy includes a detailed implementation plan and a set of milestones for concrete actions. It also sets out the measures needed to ensure that any industrial action called as part of this strategy is effective. The strategy is about prioritising activities, as is necessary and inevitable, but without privileging or isolating either industrial, political or organising work as a single solution. Its success will depend on our collective ability to maintain this balance between coordination of different types of activity and prioritisation of work, of whatever sort, that will meaningfully strengthen the influence of UCU members on the future of HE.
- HEC accepts recommendations of SoS Dispute Working Group
HEC received a report from this Working Group, which considered the proposal for UCU to initiate an industrial dispute against the Secretary of State for Education (SoS). This idea had been proposed by a grassroots group of members in 2025, with a motion passed at that year’s Sector Conference. The Working Group, which included reps from all four nations and members of all factions and none, was tasked in March with giving this possibility further consideration. The Working Group’s report, which concluded that UCU could not currently pursue a dispute with the SoS and should not commission more legal advice on it, was proposed unanimously by all its members for HEC’s consideration.
The report outlined the two rounds of legal advice obtained by UCU on the SoS dispute proposal. The full advice is confidential, but HEC members were asked above all to note the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) 2017, which explicitly prevents the SoS from intervening on any matter relating to the hiring and firing of academic staff in England. It is highly likely that similar restrictions would apply in the devolved nations, meaning any trade dispute would only apply to England (with a possibility for Northern Ireland). While UCU Commons HEC members do not share a single view on such a trade dispute, there is broad agreement that the HERA restrictions present a very serious obstacle. If the SoS were to in any way intervene on to staff recruitment, this could set a troubling precedent on academic freedom.
Furthermore, these discussions need to be specific, as there is more than one possible set of grounds for a SoS dispute. The legal advice UCU has received is unequivocal that a dispute over the HE funding model in general would be deemed ‘political’ and therefore not possible. A trade dispute over staff pay in HE could be possible, but this would not address the redundancies crisis. However, the rationale for taking up such a dispute with the SoS is unclear, as there is already a mechanism for a pay dispute with employers through JNCHES. The branch engagement report strongly suggests that members do not consider this the time for a dispute over pay, in any case.
It seems likely that debate about possible industrial strategies will therefore continue to include discussion of different ways of framing a dispute with the SoS, but this needs to be advanced within a broader discussion of political and industrial strategy. The Working Group also recommended that its work should be paused (with provision for reactivation by HEC), and that no further legal advice should be commissioned at this stage. A majority of HEC members voted to accept all the Working Group’s recommendations.
Although this is not the end of the discussion, this is an appropriate moment to acknowledge the work done by UCU members to raise the profile of the idea of a SoS dispute in the first place. This has undoubtedly stimulated a lot of productive debate, and we need to take these discussions forward in as positive a way as possible.
- HEC and HESC decisions
Much of the current discussion on industrial strategy is happening through and alongside long-running debates about the relationship between HESC and HEC. UCU’s rules are clear on the fundamentals of this relationship: while HESC is the supreme policy-making body for UCU in the HE sector, it does not have the authority under rule to mandate HEC on industrial action (see 34.1).
The same rule states that HEC should have ‘regard to’ the decisions of HESC, and this must mean the totality of HESC’s decisions. Understandably, members want to see HESC motions from their branches implemented, but HEC must deal with the fact that HESC 2026 made (as is usual) some contradictory decisions, which together do not provide a conclusive steer for industrial action. For example, an emergency motion (B27, which carried) called for a UK-wide ballot on jobs, but with no clear plan for its implementation, while another (HE11) called for a ballot but only ‘where appropriate’. Given that a sector-wide ballot over redundancies threatened by specific employers is not legally possible, some HEC members (in HESC and HEC) have suggested that all branches could issue a coordinated demand for guarantees of no compulsory redundancies from their employers, and that failure to give this guarantee could form the basis of trade disputes. If this plan were to unfold as envisaged, it could lead to a form of disaggregated UK-wide ballot, despite the fact that HE2, which called for disaggregated ballots by default, was lost by an almost two-thirds majority. Another question relates to whether HEC could compel branches to participate in this plan, which would inevitably divert resources from disputes at branches fighting threats of compulsory redundancies.
So we return to the HE strategy’s emphasis on prioritising courses of action based not on whether they are industrial, political or some other type of approach, but rather on whether they are likely to be effective. The strategy also has a concrete plan for stronger inter-branch networks to ensure that we do justice to both the local and sectoral dimensions of the fights against cuts and redundancies, as these are at the forefront of UCU’s HE activity at this moment.