UCU Commons newsletter #5, 3 December 2025
Dear subscriber
Welcome to the UCU Commons newsletter, a curated set of links and information about what's happening in UCU Commons, our union, and our sectors more generally. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have on this or any other matter.
In today's issue:
What UCU Commons have been doing
This is our first fortnightly newsletter of many that comes to you via our new platform, Ghost. Our tech-minded members pulled a shift over the last few months to migrate our online operations from Substack and Wordpress into a single place, which finally happened this week. Our URL remains the same. We have had concerns for some time about using Substack as a platform, given their refusal to deplatform hate speech, and so we are very glad to find a solution that means we can retain our followers. We also have a shiny new Bluesky handle linked to our URL, so if you don’t yet follow us there, please do!
News from UCU
The national aggregated ballot of HE institutions over pay, job protection and national agreements closed on Friday 28 November. Despite a monumental effort from staff and reps (especially when our members in FE were also being balloted), this sadly failed to meet the minimum 50% threshold for a mandate. In the end, 39.34% of eligible members returned their ballots. Of these, 69.69% voted yes for strike action, and 30.31% no. UCU Commons members who sit on our Higher Education Committee (HEC) have written a statement in response to this result. A Branch Delegates’ Meeting takes place this Thursday 4 December 1pm–2.30pm to discuss this disappointing result and to listen to branch feedback.
UCU hosted a webinar recently about our ongoing work to explore conditional indexation as a potential option for the future of the USS pension scheme. UCU’s pensions official Dooley Harte has developed a written response to questions asked in that webinar, with members of the Superannuation Working Group. Mark Pendleton, one of UCU’s USS negotiators, says “As we continue to explore conditional indexation as a potential option for the future of USS, it is important that members and branches base their discussions on the facts. This document starts to answer some commonly asked questions. There will be much more to come in the new year once the second official report from the joint working group of UCU, UCEA and USS is published shortly”.
UCU Scotland welcomes many of the amendments to the Scottish government’s Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) Bill, which is now in phase 2. This includes one from Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens, on limiting principals’ pay to no more than ten times the salary of the lowest-paid staff.
In our sectors
Last week’s budget brought little to be glad about in either FE or HE. A particularly grim announcement was the Chancellor’s decision to introduce an international student levy of £925 per student from 2028. Vivek Thuppil, representative of Migrant Members (non-EU) on NEC, said "The UK Government's decision to impose a levy on the fees paid by international students is a shameful expansion of the hostile environment. Migrants already pay thousands of pounds each for visa fees, immigration surcharges, and associated costs even before taking a single step on UK soil. Incidentally, we would expect that it is the universities that are in most financial distress that will feel unable to pass on the levy to students whereas the relatively well off Russell Group universities will be most able to pass on the levy. It is a welcome step that the Welsh Government and Scottish Government will not be implementing the international student levy at universities in Wales and Scotland respectively. I would urge Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, and the UK Government to take lessons from these countries on how to govern a nation without scapegoating and extortion of migrants".
Further grim news for our sector, which is compounded by Reeves’s international student levy, is that university teaching income in the UK has plummeted by £6.4billion in the last ten years. It is no coincidence that this has happened at the same time as the introduction of the higher rate of tuition fees, the removal of equitable student distribution across institutions, and a higher reliance on international student income.
We hope you have enjoyed this round up. Want to get involved? You can join UCU Commons and work with us towards a more effective union for post-16 education here.
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