UCU Commons newsletter #9, 11 February 2026

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 year’s national officer elections are underway and Vice President (Higher Education) candidate Mark Pendleton has had a busy start to the season. 

Before ballots opened, Mark emailed all UCU branches asking them to circulate links to his materials, as is outlined in UCU’s official guidance. If your branch hasn’t done that to members in your branch, do ask them why not. All members should be given access to all candidate materials to help make an informed choice. 

Mark has also been meeting with members in dispute across England. On Thursday, 29 January he joined members at his own branch (Sheffield) to demonstrate against the lock out of dozens of people who have refused to mitigate their own pre-Christmas strike action by rescheduling teaching. The university decided to withhold their pay a second time, a legally dubious and morally repugnant act that Sheffield UCU members are rightly furious about. He subsequently spoke at a lunchtime rally at London Metropolitan University over threats to 120 academic jobs, visited members in Bristol and Exeter, including addressing an Exeter UCU branch meeting, and spoke at the rally over the proposed closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus.

Before returning north, Mark chaired the Recruitment, Organising and Campaigning Committee (ROCC), where UCU’s new integrated campaigns and comms plan was presented, and members discussed the impending rollout of new technology designed to assist branches and members in organising, the development and function of UCU’s new parliamentary group, and UCU’s ongoing campaigns against the far right, amongst other things. 

Back home in south Manchester, where Mark lives, he’s been busy this weekend working with local activists in Gorton and Denton, his home constituency, to campaign against the rise of the far right. In the coming week, he will address members at Northumbria University, where management is attempting to force them off their current pension scheme into a less generous one, with threats to withhold pay if they don’t comply. He will also be visiting branches in south Wales later in February. If you’d like Mark to visit or speak to your branch, don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

Sophia Woodman, as president of the University of Edinburgh UCU branch, gave evidence alongside union reps from Strathclyde, Aberdeen and Dundee at the Education, Children and Young People’s committee of the Scottish Parliament in a session dedicated to universities. You can read a full text transcript or watch the video in full but for ease, we have here a clip of Sophia’s best moments from the session.

Jo Edge has written a blog post for the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU), which contains practical suggestions for things university management could easily implement to help their casualised workforce. Jo says, “I’m really glad to have had the opportunity to be paid to write for the CDBU on this important topic, and I hope our employers take note of the easily implementable recommendations I outline here”.

News from UCU

Registration for UCU’s annual Congress from 27–29 May 2026 in Harrogate is now open. Congress is UCU’s policy-setting body for the year ahead, and involves full-delegation meetings as well as sector conferences (HE and FE). Each branch gets a quota of delegates based on density; and we firmly encourage all branches to send their full delegate quota. Delegates do not have to be members of their branch’s executive committee to be able to attend, but their attendance must be ratified by a branch or committee decision. Regional and devolved nations committees can also send delegates, as can equality standing committees and employment-specific subcommittees, and members of the NEC attend in an ex-officio capacity. Like last year, Congress is held in a hybrid format, and delegates can ‘job-share’ if necessary. There is no cost to attend in-person: UCU pays for/refunds travel, accommodation and subsistence, and provides childcare at the venue. 

In our sectors

SeriousProf, aka Anthony Finkelstein, President of City St George’s, University of London, has made a case on his Substack for the further separation of ‘research’ and ‘teaching’. Responding to the piece’s key point, that “We likely require fewer academics with research in their remit, but those that do need greater time allocated, and must be subject to a strategic research management regime with a more sophisticated and developmental approach to performance management”, Dave Hitchcock, Reader at a small post-92 university, says, “More grants and more 'focused' research cannot be summoned from an exhausted and demoralised academic population with four-finger managerial pointing. Even if they do this constantly for years, nothing will get better by any of the metrics they choose to measure. The incentives simply do not line up. We could be forgiven for assuming that university managers fundamentally choose not to understand their own staff in very basic ways”.

A devastating piece in the Guardian outlining what the planned closure of the University of Essex campus at Southend means for students, staff and the wider community. The university has promised that students enrolled at Southend can finish their courses at the Colchester campus, some 45 miles away. Of course, this is not feasible for many, as highlighted by this quote from Radek Hanus, a disabled mature student in the second year of his nursing degree, “Commuting to Colchester will cost me something like £800 a month in petrol. How can I possibly afford that?”. After the aforementioned successful rally at Southend last week, Essex UCU has presented the university with alternative proposals to save the 400 jobs at risk, and plan strike action from 12–19 February with a Colchester rally on the first day. 

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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