When will the government end the strikes in sixth form colleges?
Tens of thousands of students are losing out, and more strikes were announced this week
Before we start, I should declare an interest.
I went to a brilliant state sixth form college in Huddersfield, which massively changed my life for the better.
So I’m maybe more interested than most in the wave of strikes that is causing a disaster for students in our sixth form colleges.
In fact, my old college is one of the 32 colleges that have been affected by eight days of strike action over the last term. That’s a significant chunk of school year lost already, which obviously puts students in these colleges at a big disadvantage.
More strikes were announced this week. So why are you not hearing more about this in the media? The same reason I am writing this article. The sixth form strikes are a classic example of a Whitehall phenomenon.
There are certain issues that get kind of caught in the middle.
They are big enough problems to require concerted ministerial effort to solve (and maybe some attention from No.10), but they aren’t big enough problems to create enough political ‘noise’ to bring about that effort.
I have seen many such cases in Whitehall. In fact it feels like there should be a name for them - perhaps a German compound word. Let’s call it a Nichtschlimmgenugproblem: a not-bad-enough-to-get-fixed problem.
Now, if these strikes were affecting Oxford, or Cambridge or the top 32 public schools in the country, they would be all over the media. But sixth form colleges somehow don’t catch the media eye in the same way, even though tens of thousands of students are being affected.
How we got here
In some cases industrial action is the inevitable outcome of the competition for scarce resources, and the balancing of interests between the taxpayer and the provider.
In some cases though, the origin is a ministerial screw-up. That’s the case here, and one reason why ministers should have a special obligation to try and fix this.
The Government funded this year’s national pay award for schools and for academised sixth-form colleges but, unlike last year, not for stand-alone sixth-form colleges.
No-one seems to know why stand-alone sixth forms were treated differently. In the past they were not part of the public sector, but that changed quite a while back.
That funding gap has led to a pay gap, as the colleges don’t have the money to pay the same increase as other schools and sixth forms.
As a result of the pay gap the National Education Union has carried out eight days of strikes already this academic year. They have a mandate for two more.
On tuesday the NASUWT announced that it would be holding even more strikes in 23 colleges. Aaargh.
After threats of judicial review, the Department for Education offered some additional funding: £50m, but covering both sixth form colleges and the whole of the (much bigger) Further Education sector.
But the split of that money left colleges with only £7 million of the £19 million that is needed to close the pay gap. So the strikes drag on, with disastrous consequences for A-level students in 32 colleges.
The cause of these damaging strikes was a seemingly random decision to underfund a pay award by a couple of million. A couple of million is not a small thing. But the Department for Education’s total budget for this year is just under £100 billion1.
Given that the government can find very large sums for Starmer’s deal over the Chagos Islands, the decision not to find savings to end these strikes tells you a lot about Labour’s priorities. Once upon a time, the Labour Party would never have prioritised foreign deals over public sector pay.
Is there hope? No and yes.
No, because when I asked ministers about this in the Commons the other day, they said they would not get involved, and the sector should just find the money somehow. Janet Daby said:
The hon. Member will know that industrial relations are a matter for sixth-form colleges themselves, in co-ordination with the sector-led national bargaining arrangement through the national joint council. We encourage open and constructive dialogue by all parties in the best interests of staff and students during this critical transition period.
So far so hopeless.
On the other hand, a lot of these colleges are in urban areas and in Labour constituencies. There are some signs of pressure from Labour’s backbenches to end this: in the same session in which I asked ministers about this, so did the Labour MP for Luton North. But only time will tell if Ministers are actually going to muck in and help end these strikes.
Conclusion
You might think a few days lost to strikes aren’t that bad. But there are only 190 days in a school year, and people are often amazed by the impact of attendance on attainment.
For example, at GCSE, if there is a 10 percentage point decrease in pupils’ attendance at school, the number who get a GCSE grade 5 or above in English and maths halves: 55% of those in the 0% to 5% range of absence get grade 5 or above, but only 22% in the 10% to 15% range do so.
I know I am biased here, because one of these colleges had such a great effect on my life.
But I’m afraid these damaging strikes are directly the result of a departmental screw up, so the DFE ministers have a particular responsibility to sort them out, rather than let them drag on.
99.7bn - see p155 of Autumn Budget 2024