UCU Commons newsletter #6, 17 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
Vivek Thuppil chaired the Migrant Members’ Annual Conference on 5 December 2025, which took place in a hybrid format at UCU’s head office in London. This was the last of the five day-long equality conferences this year. Vivek says, “with a Labour government in the UK pushing a xenophobic policy agenda, the conference dedicated its focus to changing the narrative. Attendees heard from campaigners from Regularise and Focus on Labour Exploitation. We held workshops on effective local organising, mobilising the political power of migrants, and discussing the priorities of the year ahead for the UCU Migrant Members Standing Committee”.
Dave Hitchcock has written an excoriating analysis of the recent failed national ballot of HE members, which strikes (sorry) at the heart of the destructive effects of HEC’s decision to call it. ‘Describing the strategy as “striking for the sake of strikes” is perhaps unfair, but more often than not the shoe really does fit. This approach wastes one of the most precious resources in union activism: the willingness, hope, and energy of your membership, as well as their ability to take action, which are all spent during strikes, and which are not inexhaustible’.
Relatedly, several UCU Commons members attended the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) on Thursday 4 December, and we have produced a report of this BDM which highlights key themes from branch feedback.
News from UCU
The redundancy crisis plaguing HE shows no sign of abating, with Essex University announcing 400 jobs to be cut and the closure of their campus in Southend. Late last week anecdotal evidence suggested that as many as 1,000 staff members had received formal risk of redundancy letters across the university. Announcing these cuts in the run-up to Christmas is cruel, and we are especially concerned at the complete removal of the campus at Southend – one of Essex’s most deprived areas.
UCU is running a survey on the timing of our annual Congress which is open to all members regardless of whether they have attended Congress before, which closes on 23 January 2026. Jo Edge, a casually-employed member of UCU, says “In recent years, Congress has rotated between three week days during May half-term and the late May bank holiday weekend, in order to allow for as many people as possible to attend. FE and casualised members especially can struggle to attend during regular working hours or in term-time. While the option to attend remotely helps, along with UCU’s commitment to covering all costs of attending the event in-person, I welcome an approach which allows as many UCU members as possible to be able to attend, so please do take a few minutes to complete the survey”.
In our sectors
We were disgusted to see in the Times a report that the vice chancellors of Cambridge and other Russell Group universities have been cosying up to Nigel Farage and his allies in the Reform Party. This capitulation in advance to the destructive and Trumpian agenda of a party that may or may not be in power in 2029 is a damning indictment of university leadership.
Our sibling union in Australia, the NTEU, has had a successful campaign to get people and governments to take notice of the crises besetting Australian universities. One major problem, which we can relate to in the UK, is the corporate takeover of governance, which has undermined the primary teaching and research functions of universities. A recently published Senate inquiry report vindicates their arguments, and attributes casualisation, wage theft and course cuts firmly to those failed university governance structures. As Mark Pendleton argued in his report to HEC in October 2025, there is much to learn from this in terms of campaigning for HE as a public good here in the UK. Mark says, “it has been a long time since a parliamentary inquiry anywhere recommended, in concrete terms, systematic measures to address the failures in university governance that have caused compounding crises in higher education. Congratulations to the NTEU for this vindication of their work! The UK desperately needs reform here too, and the new CDBU code provides a helpful UK-focused push for the necessary changes we also need to see”.
We hope you have enjoyed this round up. Want to get involved? Join UCU Commons and work with us towards a more effective union for post-16 education here.
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This is the last UCU Commons newsletter of 2025. We wish all our subscribers and readers a restful winter break, and the first newsletter of 2026 will drop on Wednesday 14 January.