Casual Vacancy: UK-elected member (HE)

UCU Commons is delighted that our member Madeleine Moore is standing for the current casual vacancy on UCU's National Executive Committee.

Madeleine is a long-standing, experienced member of UCU and we believe she will be a great asset to our NEC. We encourage you to give her your first preference vote.

You can read Madeleine's election statement below.

I am a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Loughborough University and have previously held positions at Hull, Oxford and Imperial. 

This is a critical time for post-16 education, with institutions slashing budgets, cutting courses and squeezing wherever they can. The situation has only been exacerbated by recent Governments. In such times, it is trade unions that must lead the fightback. UCU plays a key role advocating for one of the UK’s most valuable sectors and, importantly, protecting colleagues and friends who are in increasingly precarious positions.

These difficulties are hitting institutions across the board, irrespective of size, location or age. I offer valuable experience as someone who has worked across a breadth of institutions. As a union, we must work at both local and UK-wide level to stem the tide of job cuts and casualization, all the while championing the importance of the sector to politicians, both in terms of local communities and the wider economy.

At the University of Hull, I witnessed management fritter away financial security on building projects and a speculative London campus, leading to a substantial deficit a few years later. An ensuing series of faculty restructures only exacerbated the issue by cutting professional service staff, as well as several courses. This included Chemistry, which had had a strong rapport with Humberside industry for decades, helping sustain a local economy suffering years of political neglect. Similar tales play out nationwide. On NEC, I will push for a rounded UCU strategy to tackle the sectorial crisis, developing political and public campaigning while building on successful local industrial actions.

As an intersectional feminist, I am a passionate advocate for EDI. I currently serve as a member of both the UCU Women Members and LGBTQ+ Standing Committees, and was a UCU delegate at the 2026 TUC Women’s Congress. Outside of UCU, I sit on the LGBTQ+ Staff Network and Athena Swan committees at Loughborough and I was Faculty EDI Lead at Hull.

I am proud of UCU’s unapologetically inclusive stances defending, amongst others, migrant, trans and disabled colleagues in the wake of vicious political rhetoric. It is the responsibility of a trade union to support its marginalized workers and to recognize that the issues we face may be compounded by intersectionality. In particular, I oppose unequivocally the cruel EHRC Code of Practice, that will leave trans colleagues in fear in their daily lives. I helped draft the successful Congress motion ‘In Defence of Trans Workers’ and UCU’s trans, non-binary and intersex inclusion branch guidance released this year.

None of us are free until all of us are free.

I am a member of UCU Commons. You can find out about us at: https://ucucommons.org/.