Ahead of further strike action taking place at Fife College on Friday the 3rd of May, I wrote to the Minister for Higher and Further Education calling on him to “do his job” and find a solution to the longstanding industrial action facing the college sector across Scotland.
The Educational Institute of Scotland gave notice in March to all of Scotland’s Further Education colleges of a programme of rolling strike action in a long running dispute over pay. This marks a further escalation in the pay dispute, where members of the EIS-Further Education Lecturers Association (EIS-FELA) have been taking action short of strike since the middle of February and have already taken a national day of strike action.
It is my understanding that colleges are facing a 4.7% cut in their budgets for 2024/25, a cash cut of £32.7 million, on top of the deletion of a promised £26m in transformation funding from the previous Scottish Budget. This is further to the recent report from Audit Scotland showing that Scotland’s 24 colleges have had 8.5% in real terms – £45.5million in core funding to run colleges – removed from budgets since 2021/22.
The EIS-FELA does not accept that their members should be treated any differently to any other public sector worker and are simply seeking a pay offer which is reflective of their public sector status and their professional role in education.
The latest survey by the Institute of Directors Scotland of their members showed that almost 50% of responses reported recruiting skilled workers as a major concern for the future. Our colleges are the key resource in providing these necessary skills and that requires proper funding and resource. Quality education and the training and upskilling of our future workforce cannot be delivered by cutting college budgets. If the Scottish Government is serious about the future of Scotland’s economy and future opportunities for our young people, then it must recognise the vital role colleges have to play and the important work college staff deliver.
The unprecedented cuts to college budgets paint a worrying picture as to what value this government places on college education. If we are serious about delivering a properly trained and skilled workforce for the future, then we need to properly fund colleges. Far too many young people in Fife do not have the education and skills needed to give them a good start in the world of work and this must change. We need our colleges to be geared up to support and equip people for the world of work and that means sorting out this dispute and putting in place the resources required.
The Minister for Higher and Further Education needs to do his job and sort this dispute out and recognise that we have a major skills shortage in Fife and across Scotland that needs to be addressed.
Addressing the skills shortage cannot be done by slashing budgets and creating industrial action with our colleges. The situation needs to be dealt with, and urgently, otherwise we are letting both those in further education and the staff in our colleges down.
