The Secretary of State (SoS) Campaign: the next steps!

The crisis is already here in higher education. At least 30,000 jobs have been destroyed so far. A growing list of universities are at risk of closure. Workers in higher education are fighting branch by branch, but we need national industrial strategy.

In the vacuum of ideas and recycled comms campaigns from UCU leadership, rank-and-file members have been building a campaign for a national dispute with the SoS. After unanimous support at two congresses in a row, it is UCU HE policy to hold a trade dispute with the SoS over sector funding.

So, what does that look like?

• UCEA tell us they can’t settle over our demands for job security with the current funding model
• HERA means the SoS controls the funding model
• TULRCA includes a clause that, in the public sector, if employers can’t resolve a dispute, workers can escalate to the SoS
• This means UCU and JNCHES sister unions can call a trade dispute with the SoS!

This strategy can work, but it has stalled in the union’s bureaucracy. There are fears that this strategy won’t work because we haven’t done it before. Branches commissioned legal advice showing the dispute’s viability. We have also seen NEU use this strategy in the past. However, we can never guarantee that any new strategy is without risk. Indeed, HEC has commissioned its own legal advice on narrow grounds, which, from summaries seen of it, outlines the complexity of the dispute but does not rule it out as unlawful.

The SoS dispute is not a shortcut to solving the sector’s problems. It won’t immediately stop the redundancies or get members jobs back. But it can be the start of a fight over the future of higher education, not only limiting how much worse it will get. We need to be excited about what we are trying to do in our union, not just worried about the latest news in the sector.

Not willing to observe passively while the sector is stolen from the public, members have already voted twice at congress to open the SoS dispute. Now 24 branches have coordinated to move the strategy forward and have called for a Special Higher Education Sector Conference (SHESC).

Special Higher Education Sector Conference

The motion to requisition the SHESC called for UCU to organise the conference to discuss:

1. Holding a dispute with the Secretary of State (SoS) for Education over HE Funding

2. Supporting branches with e-balloting

A SHESC has the same constitutional function as the annual Higher Education Sector Conference (usually known as Congress). It is a space for delegates from every HE branch in the union to debate and vote on motions that become union policy. The Higher Education Committee (HEC) must abide by and implement the decisions passed at the conference.

24 branches of the union making a coordinated attempt to open up a democratic space to discuss and vote on a national industrial strategy shows the strength of feeling behind this initiative. Members want a proportionate industrial response to the current crisis, and they are taking matters into their own hands.

On 16 September, UCU national gave notice to branch officers that the SHESC will take place on 14 October. They gave branches 11 working days to pass motions at branch meetings to submit them to the SHESC. This is clearly not enough time for branches to call meetings and circulate and table motions. Nevertheless, branches are working against these constraints to submit motions.

At the time of publication, UCU national have not informed the wider membership that the SHESC is taking place. This is while the leadership has energised its comms strategy, bombarding members with videos at the TUC and Labour Party conference, and using subs for a video podcast that no one asked for. The recent grammatically dubious campaign launched by UCU (“Education. It’s Ours”) appears to mostly be a rebranding of the “Stop the Cuts” campaign launched back in January 2025.

At the same time, the President and Vice President (in flagrant disregard for the union’s democratic structures) have repeatedly indicated that decisions made at the SHESC will not be implemented. Instead of members debating and voting, they argue that only the Higher Education Committee can decide the union’s strategy.

Under these conditions, it’s hard not to be cynical about the national union and the barriers in the way of member-led democracy. But small as it might seem, 24 branches working together to force this conference into being already marks a massive shift in the union’s internal culture. The SHESC gives those branches an opportunity to lead a broader structure of feeling across the sector: to show members that we are not isolated, that other branches are facing the same crisis, and that there is a growing appetite to fight back together.
In the SHESC, we can hear from branches already fighting, learn from their experiences, and inspire one another with what is possible when members act collectively. We need to build the confidence that our union has industrial power locally and nationally — and that power means very little if we are unwilling to use it. Every branch that has fought redundancies will have witnessed moments when courage and inspiration have overcome fear and hesitation. We need to bring that same spirit to our national union.
We need to use the conference to bring many more branches into a fight for higher education, build a wider and deeper mandate for national industrial action, and give members the confidence to see themselves not as bystanders to the destruction of their profession, but as agents with the power to collectively change it.
The SHESC is our opportunity to show each other that we are up for the fight, and that a trade union is not a lobbying body. We have the numbers, the organisation, and the industrial power. Now we need to use it together.

Edinburgh UCU

At the University of Edinburgh workers organised with UCU are entering our third academic year of industrial dispute. In January 2024 the Senior Leadership Team announced that they intended to make cuts totalling £140 million in yearly costs, including £90 million from staff budgets, equating to roughly 1500-2000 roles or around 1 in 10 workers. In that time we have taken eleven days of strike action spread over three periods, and from May 1st to September 1st 2026 we engaged in a Marking & Assessment Boycott. These actions have substantially slowed the pace of implementation – SLT claimed they wanted the cuts implemented by July 2026 – and we have managed so far to avoid large-scale compulsory redundancies, although these have been imminent at many points. Freedom of Information requests have, however, revealed that more than 1,000 roles have been lost through voluntary and involuntary severance at a smaller scale that SLT claims is “business as usual”, and, together with “hidden redundancies” through unrenewed fixed-term contracts and cuts to guaranteed hours tutor budgets, may put the real number much higher.

Most recently, in mid-September, over ninety degree programmes were summarily closed to future students in the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences. These closures were imposed through a process labelled “Academic Size & Shape (ASS)”, and decided following meetings held during a period of industrial peace January-March last year, where the branch agreed to not take industrial action in return for no compulsory redundancies prior to April 29th (the end of our mandate at the time), and a commitment on SLT’s part to “meaningful consultation”. Nevertheless the “ASS workshops” excluded union participation, despite the obvious connection between programme closures and cuts to livelihoods. The same student number metrics used to justify programme closures are now planned for implementation at course level, with immediate implications for potential redundancy pooling.

In response the UCU Edinburgh branch has voted for five weeks (twenty-five working days) of strike action, starting September 28th and lasting through to October 30th; weeks 2 to 6 of our 11 week semester. For the first two weeks all members are walking out to shut down the University’s operations as widely as possible, while for the third, fourth, and fifth weeks members with teaching responsibilities are taking strike action on that day in order to stop all delivery of courses. Between the two phases of strike action SLT are now facing a cancellation of the first half of the semester, and the very real threat of students not being able to complete their mid-term assessments. Yet students remain firmly on our side, the threat to their education is crystal clear with the programme and course closures, and students and workers across the campus unions have been mobilising to create a Student-Staff Assembly to coordinate joint action.

Bath Spa Ltd

TRANSMISSION FROM THE FUTURE

A report from the remaining teaching staff of Bath Spa U Ltd, Canary Wharf

I have been sent back in time. I am an AI system developed by the remaining teaching staff of Bath Spa U Ltd, Canary Wharf. There are not many of them left, and they don’t have much time. My instructions are simple: explain what happened to university teaching after the subsidiary model was generalised, before it is too late for you to recognise what is being built around you.

The institution you work for will eventually cease to resemble what you understand as a university. It will still have a university’s name. It will still award university degrees. Students will still pay university fees. There will still be buildings, classrooms, timetables, graduation ceremonies and people called lecturers. But the academic institution will have been hollowed out beyond all recognition. We call it the subsidiary. The subsidiary is the university without the university. It takes the degree programmes, the students and the revenue while stripping away the conditions that made university teaching an academic profession.

In our institution, teaching staff are expected to teach 18 hours every week. That is not 18 hours of work. It is 18 hours of teaching. Six hours of teaching a day. And the teaching material is centrally managed. You do not meaningfully determine what is taught. You do not meaningfully determine how it is taught. You do not have the workload allocation necessary to redesign modules or programmes. The content arrives from elsewhere. Your task is to deliver it. For each hour of teaching, you are allocated approximately 18 minutes of preparation. That is enough time, perhaps, to discover what you are supposed to teach. It is not enough time to seriously research it, rethink it, update it, contextualise it, redesign the material, develop an exercise, consider the students in front of you, or produce something intellectually worthwhile. You end up reading from the slides.
There are three intakes a year. The three-intake model means there is no substantial period in which teaching staff can stop teaching, undertake research, develop new teaching material, write, collaborate with colleagues or simply prepare properly for the next academic year. The academic year becomes a continuous cycle of production. One cohort arrives. Another follows. Then another. And the workers are expected to be permanently available.

Under such conditions, students become deeply disengaged. And why wouldn’t they? They are receiving a severely degraded educational experience. They pay the same money. They pursue the same degrees. But the educational experience is far worse than their counterparts in the home institution. At present, there is a two-tier university. But very soon the whole university will be subsumed to this highly lucrative model.

There is, however, one institution that survived the old times: the union. At first, workers joined because they just wanted a space to talk to other workers and confirm each other’s reality. ‘Yes, this is very very weird, and yes, the workload is insane’. We are now building towards a recognition campaign.

But our message from the future is this: The subsidiary model is expanding because it solves a problem for university management. That problem is generating revenue in an economically failing sector. So we need a strategy for subsidiarisation, not simply a demand that subsidiaries be prohibited. We need to organise the workers already inside them. There is currently no committee in UCU made up specifically of subsidiary workers. There needs to be one. Not because subsidiary workers are a special category of worker. But because the subsidiary is becoming a special category of university strategy. The workers employed through these structures need to become the organised force capable of driving them back in-house.

That is why I have been sent back. Not to tell you that the future is inevitable. But to tell you what happens when workers allow the future to be organised for them. My creators have asked me to end with one sentence. Here it is: Do not wait until the subsidiary becomes the university. By the time that happens, it will be impossible to resist.

Come with me if you want to live. Organise the subsidiary workers now!

End of Transmission.

Goldsmiths UCU

On Thursday 26 March, Interim Vice Chancellor David Oswell announced ‘Future Goldsmiths’, presenting plans for wide-scale restructuring and redundancies of Professional Services (Workstream 1) to accrue savings of £9.3 million followed by Academic redundancies and restructuring in Autumn 2026 (Workstream 2) to realise savings of £10.1 million. An additional £2.6 million would be sought through ‘other’ savings.

It’s worth noting that this is the third round of major redundancy in five years. The savings made have been frittered away: £14 million on consultants, £2 million on law firms and financial mismanagement in the IT department to the tune of £700,000. As with other programs of austerity, these restructures are simply a redistribution of resources away from teaching and frontline services and towards the upper managerial strata and do nothing to improve the financial sustainability of the university, never mind improve the lives of the people who actually work and study here.

On Monday 13 April, following a resoundingly successful ballot to take industrial action (81% voted YES to strike action, 92% voted YES to ASOS with a 63% turnout), our branch voted to initiate a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). The MAB commenced from Monday 27 April. Management responded with a lockout, imposing 100% pay deductions and telling union members that any work they did would be considered “voluntary”. Our branch then voted to commence indefinite strike action.

Fightback

Since then we have been locked into a long and gruelling dispute. Management have been intransigent, delaying and stonewalling negotiations. Thousands of marks are missing, and crucial summer work around recruitment, supervision, and teaching preparation has been left undone. Students have been unable to progress or graduate. At the time of writing, a new VC has taken up her position and offered a series of meetings, giving some hope that the dispute may be resolved.

A few aspects of the fightback should be highlighted.

Many union members have lost their jobs in recent years, and the branch has worked hard to reconstitute itself after each of these shocks. According to the data we have gathered, participation in this action, the third round of major industrial action in five years, is about equivalent to the last round, an impressive achievement given the attrition and demoralisation we have suffered. This is the first time we have sustained indefinite strike action over four months. UCU members have made a huge effort to fundraise and show solidarity.

Students at Goldsmiths have also made heroic efforts. A collective of students occupied the library at the start of the dispute, while others have written open letters, fundraised, organised teachouts and alternative degree shows, and supported one another through an extraordinarily difficult time. These efforts have taken place against a backdrop of repression of student activism for Palestine, including supporting a Goldsmiths student currently incarcerated for alleged sabotage of the Israeli war machine and campaigning to ensure students from Gaza are able to take up their places at Goldsmiths.

Our branch has organised mass all-staff meetings open to all workers at Goldsmiths. This has been crucial in building solidarity between different groups of workers affected by the proposed plans.

Aside from industrial action, our branch has participated in the work of collective consultation and casework supporting affected members. Highlighting inconsistencies and failures in the redundancy process is an important part of slowing the process down. Highlighting these inconsistencies also give affected workers a fighting chance in disputing their redundancy in tribunal, or securing enhanced redundancy pay.

As it stands, we are now at crunch time. If the dispute is not resolved soon, academic redundancies will be announced. Industrial action will continue into the new term. The branch is still holding firm for a commitment to no compulsory redundancies, an end to top-down curriculum changes, and meaningful consultation on the use of so-called AI. Sustained action has been gruelling, and we ask for the support of comrades across the trade union movement and beyond. If you are able, please donate to our fighting fund and pass motions in support of our action. The fight at Goldsmiths also highlights the need for a national fightback against the funding model and governance structures in HE, and our branch has actively campaigned for the national dispute against the Secretary of State.

University of Nottingham UCU

UoN rank and file report - Sep 2026

The University of Nottingham’s (UoN) commitment to endless cut-backs and redundancies in many ways dates back to its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, although its recent course of action began in earnest in 2023, when management first began to highlight the existence of large financial deficits. This was in part thanks to a disastrous £37.5m purchase, £40m refurbishment, and projected £14.4m sale of a now abandoned city centre campus building. As a result, the university instituted a recruitment freeze (which included the non-renewal of fixed term contracts) and implemented a ‘Mutually Agreed Resignation Scheme’ (MARS). This scheme resulted in the loss of around 300 members of staff (not counting the end of fixed term or casual contracts) and cost the university £12.1m in severance. It was soon followed by a two-part restructuring plan which was announced in April 2025, named ‘Future Nottingham (FN)’, or “no-future Nottingham” as it was later dubbed by workers. Phase one of FN entailed a mass redundancy program targeted at Administrative, Professional & Managerial (APM) staff, while phase two targeted academic teaching and research staff, alongside technicians - a strategy clearly aimed at differentiating between groups of workers who are largely represented by Unison, UCU and Unite respectively. During the first phase 3900 APM staff received notice that they were at risk of redundancy, 258 roles were directly targeted, 98 vacant posts scrapped, and hundreds more lost through voluntary redundancy. In many cases, voluntary redundancies were preceded by ‘protected conversations’ (where members of staff were basically told to jump before they were pushed). FN phase two (which is currently underway), has put 2,700 academic staff at risk of redundancy, with the aim of removing over 700 people . Management have claimed that sacking staff and axing courses is their route to ‘unlocking growth’, which is presumably why their ‘Strategic Case for Change’ claimed that these measures would deliver a financial surplus of up to £85m by 2029/30 (that’s a rate of 9%), to enable investment in their “strategic priorities”, none of which appear to include teaching, research, or the day to day running of the university.

Workers at UoN have been on the front foot in challenging this course of action. Ahead of the official FN announcements, the UCU UoN branch passed a motion which resolved to declare a dispute over the refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies. By summer 2025, the UCU and Unison branches on campus had balloted their members, both voting in favour of industrial action. The UCU branch took a day of strike action on 24th July 2025, followed by continuous action short of strike, and another two weeks of strike action beginning on 22nd September that year. Importantly, this latter period involved a historic 3 days of planned combined UCU and Unison strike action. Unfortunately, this never came to fruition. On the eve of the strikes, management approached the Unison branch leadership with a 12-month deal, offering: ‘alternative employment to enable individuals to choose whether they want to take up those opportunities to avoid compulsory redundancy’ (i.e, an agreement to observe basic redundancy procedures). The Unison branch leadership and regional officials agreed to stand down their strike action on 19th September 2025, taking the deal to their members in early October, long after the opportunity for joint action had passed. With this divide and rule tactic successfully implemented, the Vice Chancellor made few concessions in their subsequent meetings with the UCU branch.

In the face of this intransigence, UCU members at Nottingham voted to continue their strike action for a further two weeks beginning 13th October 2025. This forced management to offer a resolution: if UCU stood down this round of strikes, the university would commit to remove the threat of compulsory redundancies until 31st October 2026, and introduce a negotiation process over course closures. While members voted to accept this deal in November 2025, it coincided with management’s announcement that they planned to suspend and close 48 courses across American and Canadian Studies, Biosciences, Education, Music, Nursing, and Social Work - proving that they had, predictably, acted in bad faith with their claims to reconsider course closures. By way of response, UCU members agreed to maintain their action short of strike. Unsurprisingly, as the year long moratorium on compulsory redundancies came to an end, plans to axe more staff resumed.
Then in May 2026 2,700 staff members received letters identifying them as at risk of redundancy. This cut seeks to remove over 690 FTE roles which is over 700 people’s jobs. In some cases these cuts wipe out whole departments, and in others significant reductions of up to 49% of staff.

However, UoN UCU members had already returned another local ballot in favour of industrial action by April 2026, and on 20th May 2026, commenced a Marking and Assessment Boycott. Management responded as they increasingly do across the sector: with the threat of 100% pay deductions for action short of strike. This backfired. But while it galvanised members leading to a disruptive Marking and Assessment Boycott and the cancellation of full student graduation (which were replaced by celebration events), significant compulsory redundancies and course closure remained on the table.

With little movement from university management over summer, and consecutive votes of no confidence in University Council passed by the campus unions, the UoN UCU branch has announced plans for a further 67 days strike action at the beginning of this academic year - basically taking out the whole semester. Those remaining members of staff at UoN, many of whom are already feeling the pinch of rising workloads thanks to increasing student numbers and a vastly depleted workforce, are understandably fatigued. In fact, a Freedom of Information request submitted by UCU members found skyrocketing levels of sickness absence associated with stress anxiety. Despite this, UCU members are no less determined to fight both on the picket line and at the negotiation table with multiple credible alternative proposals that achieve the same financial savings but without imposed staff loss. While many jobs have already been saved thanks to industrial action and staff-led consultation, UoN still wants over 600 people gone, despite huge numbers having applied for voluntary redundancy.

We know that the job losses and constant threat of redundancy we are facing at UoN is an experience shared by thousands of colleagues across the sector. While we have become all too familiar with the particular ways in which our management manufactures evidence for endless cuts (in spite of growing student recruitment, rising voluntary redundancy applications, and an increasing financial surplus which undermines their entire economic argument), we know that the current national funding crisis in Higher Education provides a backdrop to, and an excuse for, their “strategic priorities”. That is why, in addition to our hard fought local battles, workers at UoN have also organised alongside union members from across the UK, via the University Rank-and-File Network, in order to push our national unions into addressing the root cause of our current crisis, linking up our multiple local struggles in the process.

On 29th April 2025, the UoN UCU branch voted 97% in favour of progressing a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over the issue of HE funding, after which a motion to pursue this dispute was overwhelmingly carried at UCU’s national Congress in 2025.
Shortly after Congress, on 22nd July 2025, the UCU branch at Nottingham once again passed a motion, directly calling on the national union to make this strategy a reality. Despite this, UCU has failed to progress the dispute. As a result, at the 2026 UCU Congress, delegates were once again forced to submit and pass a motion which reaffirmed the dispute’s democratic mandate. Shortly after this, on 15th June, the UoN UCU branch voted 93% in favour of a motion which called for a UCU Special Higher Education Sector Conference (SHESC) on the topic of opening and progressing this dispute, as well as coordinating a campaign with other education unions, and developing a process for electronic balloting for industrial action (now enabled by the Employment Rights Act 2025). In short, UCU members at UoN have spent the last three years organising local strike action, while also seeking to progress a sector-wide dispute which utilises our industrial leverage to address the root causes of the current crises in HE: the funding model.

Our situation is not unique of course, at UoN as with elsewhere rank and file university workers have taken the initiative in their branches, organising local strike action (many for the first time), learning how to run a local ballot while navigating trade union law and union bureaucracy in the process, and leading the challenge against the cuts which are decimating university education. Similarly, it has been rank and file workers across the sector who have engaged in cross-branch organising to devise and advance new and creative strategies aimed at addressing the causes of the crisis in HE. In the face of this existential threat to university education (and the trade unions in those sectors), the past few years have seen our local and national level struggles single-handedly advanced by the self-organisation of university workers on the ground. In order to win this fight, our national representatives need to proactively facilitate this collective organisation, drawing on the capabilities, resources and knowledge that members have built-up in recent disputes, and unleashing their combined creative potential in the process. The successful organisation of UCU’s SHESC could be an important step in this direction.

Coventry UCU

When does a university stop being a university? The “Coventry Way”!

When does a university stop being a university?

Is it when the people teaching its students no longer work for it? Or is it when academics are transferred into subsidiary companies but continue teaching the same students, on the same courses, under the same university name? Perhaps it’s when collective agreements built up over decades are ripped up and trade union recognition no longer follows workers doing the same academic work? Or is it when the parts of the university that remain start disappearing too?

In September 2026, staff in two Coventry University research centres were called into meetings and told that their centres were proposed for closure. For those of us in Coventry UCU, there was a depressing familiarity to it. We have spent the past few years moving from one restructure to another: an endless cycle of compulsory redundancies, reorganisations, TUPE transfers, changes to terms and conditions and battles over trade union recognition.

But what is happening at Coventry is about much more than job cuts and worsening terms and conditions

Coventry is a canary in the coalmine for UK higher education.
University staff elsewhere need to understand what has been done here because, in a sector in financial crisis, the Coventry model offers university managements a particularly attractive possibility: keep the university, but get rid of university employment.

2,788 transfers in 3 years

Coventry management argues that its restructuring is necessary to put the University Group on a sustainable financial footing. In 2023, the Group embarked on a programme intended to reduce expenditure by £95 million over three years. Coventry’s latest financial update reported a £59.3 million pre-tax deficit for 2024/25, while arguing that its reforms are putting the Group on course to break even. So, at Coventry, restructuring has become a way of life.

As a UCU branch, we started trying to put numbers on what was happening. That proved difficult.
We have submitted Freedom of Information request after Freedom of Information request asking basic questions about redundancies, workforce numbers, TUPE transfers and restructuring across the Coventry University Group. Again and again, requests have gone overdue, information has been withheld or only partially disclosed, and we have had to seek internal reviews or escalate matters to the Information Commissioner’s Office to get anything at all.

Much of what we now know about the scale of Coventry’s transformation has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light.
Eventually, we got some of the numbers.

Coventry University’s FOI response records 401 staff transferred from Coventry University into subsidiaries in 2023/24, 1,197 in 2024/25 and another 1,190 in 2025/26. That’s 2,788 TUPE transfers in 3 years.

A university without university employees

The Coventry model is based upon a simple but important distinction. University work does not have to be performed by people employed by the university.

Students can enrol at Coventry University. They can study for Coventry University degrees. Teaching can take place in Coventry buildings. Courses can carry the Coventry name.

But the lecturer teaching those students does not work for Coventry University.

One of the most important companies in this story is PeoplesFuture Ltd.
PFL is not an external outsourcing company. It sits within the Coventry University Group and until we pointed it out to CU, it was registered on Companies House as a “temporary employment agency”.

TU-PE or not TU-PE

For many of our staff this transformation has taken place through TUPE.

TUPE is supposed to protect workers when their employer changes. It should protect their terms and conditions. It should protect their trade union membership. Not the case here at CUG, apparently.
Ripping up collective agreements
At Coventry, UCU recognition and collective agreements historically meant that questions about academic work were collective questions. Workload, working time and other conditions existed within a negotiated framework. Well, not any more. Subsidiarisation fractures that settlement.

Once university work is moved to another legal employer, the work can be separated from the collective arrangements historically attached to it.And the differences workers have faced are not minor.

The new model can involve teaching expectations of up to 750 hours rather than around 510, the removal of protected scholarly activity, expectations of availability across a 7-day operating model, requirement to work at any of our campuses overseas with dubious human rights records (Kazakhstan anyone?) and reductions in annual leave, sick pay, notice provisions and pensions. At CUG the post-92 agreement is in the dustbin.

The lecture remains.
The module remains.
The students remain.
The Coventry University name remains.

But the employment settlement underneath them has fundamentally changed.

What happens to the union?

UCU is recognised for academic staff within Coventry University. But there’s fewer than 200 staff left in CU, and staff numbers employed by CU are falling.
UCU is not recognised within the subsidiaries. So staff can be a UCU member before the transfer. They can be a UCU member after the transfer. They can perform academic work before the transfer. They can perform the same academic work after the transfer. They can work for the Coventry University Group before and after the transfer.
But the collective bargaining relationship changes because the name of the company employing them has changed.

Coventry University Group is currently proposing other arrangements for staff representation and has engaged with trade unions about its model of employee relations. But that doesn’t answer the fundamental problem confronting our members.
Management operates across the Group. Senior managers can hold responsibilities and decision making powers spanning different Group companies. Workforce strategy can be coordinated across those companies. Restructuring can take place across the Group. Staff, meanwhile, are divided according to which corporate entity employs them.

Management is centralised. Staff are fragmented.

That is one of the most important things university staff elsewhere should understand about the “Coventry way”.

Redundant one day, recruiting the next

Corporate restructuring can also create situations that are difficult for workers to comprehend. We have seen workers lose their jobs from Coventry University and then see jobs advertised through PFL involving work that redundant staff could have performed. From a corporate perspective, management argues that these are different employers and differently constituted roles. We see something rather simpler.The university still needs teaching. Students still need lecturers. Modules still need delivering. The work hasn’t disappeared. What has changed is the employment relationship through which that work is provided.

Finding out what is happening
As a branch, we have tried to fight this in different ways. We have challenged restructures and consultation processes. We have supported staff through redundancy and grievance procedures. We have scrutinised contracts and challenged changes to terms and conditions. We have sought legal advice. We have pursued trade union recognition. And we have submitted FOI requests simply to establish what is happening to our own workforce. As a committee we have been decimated with the transferring of staff to subsidiaries (where we aren’t recognised) and redundancies.

Still here

The restructuring has inevitably affected our ability to organise. Coventry UCU is a much smaller branch than it once was. But we are still here.

We continue to support members facing redundancy. We continue to challenge consultation processes. We continue to pursue information the University doesn’t readily provide. And we continue to fight for the collective representation of workers doing academic work across the Coventry University Group.

Keeping a branch functioning while the bargaining unit beneath it is being dismantled is itself part of the struggle.

A canary in the coalmine

It would be comforting to dismiss Coventry as an aberration. But, we don’t think university workers can afford to do that. We have raised the flag, raised the alarm, and shouted out to region and national UCU so many times for help, but none so far has been forthcoming.
That should worry HE staff elsewhere.

Celebrated from above

There is a bitter irony in how the transformation of Coventry looks depending on where you are standing.

From below, staff have experienced redundancy, repeated restructuring, mass TUPE transfers, deteriorating conditions and the erosion of collective bargaining. From above, Coventry’s transformation is presented as innovation.
In 2026, our Vice-Chancellor, Professor John Latham, was shortlisted by University Alliance for its Lifetime Achievement Award.
He didn’t win, but the nomination itself is telling.

The period in which workers have experienced this enormous upheaval is simultaneously a period in which the University’s leadership has received high-level recognition within the sector.

Latham is also a Non-Executive Board Member of the government’s Department for Business and Trade, where he chairs its Audit and Risk Assurance Committee.

None of this means that Coventry’s employment model is government policy. But surely we should be worried. The people responsible for Coventry’s transformation move in precisely the circles in which the future of universities, business and employment is discussed.

And Coventry demonstrates something that managers elsewhere in a sector-wide financial crisis may find extremely interesting.
You can keep the university while changing what it means to be employed by one.

Why workers elsewhere should care

Every time a new restructuring exercise begins, we understandably focus on the immediate fight. But our experience at Coventry has taught us to look at the bigger picture. Because the danger isn’t simply that universities will employ fewer people.It is that the meaning of being a university worker is being rewritten.

Workers experience Coventry as one institution.

Students experience Coventry as one university.

The public sees Coventry University.

Management coordinates strategy across the Coventry University Group.

Yet when workers attempt to exercise collective power, suddenly the precise identity of the legal company employing them matters enormously.

And that is why workers elsewhere should look at Coventry.

Ask who actually employs the people teaching your students.

Ask where workers go when they disappear from university headcounts.

Ask what happens to collective agreements when work moves between companies.

Ask whether trade union recognition follows the work.

Ask who benefits when management remains organised across the whole institution while workers are divided between different employers.

And demand the information before thousands of workers have already been transferred.

Keep the university, lose the university worker.

Universities are not their logos, property portfolios or corporate structures. They are their staff and students.

They are the lecturers teaching students, researchers producing knowledge, technicians making laboratories work, professional services staff keeping institutions functioning, cleaners maintaining campuses and all the other workers whose labour makes higher education possible.

Our experience should serve as a warning. Because the next stage of the HE crisis may not simply involve universities closing.

It may involve universities surviving by hollowing themselves out.

Keep the students.
Keep the courses.
Keep the buildings.
Keep the brand.
Move the workers.
Rewrite the contracts.
Fragment the bargaining unit.
Erode the collective agreements.
Then restructure what remains.

When does a university stop being a university?

University workers across the sector may want to start asking that question now.

King’s College London

While there have been some redundancies at KCL, nothing of the scale across the rest of the sector is happening (yet). Instead KCL is recruiting more students and aiming to grow even further. At the same time, management is refusing to negotiate on increases to the London Weighting Allowance or a range of other issues, even though they have a large cash surplus. With UNISON and Unite, all the campus unions are now preparing for a consultative ballot on industrial action.

Without any consultation, management is also acquiring Cranfield University - the only university in Britain with an airfield - to develop research and links with the arms industry. We only found out after it was leaked to the press. While KCL has long maintained links with the Ministry of Defence and the arms industry, the “merger” would greatly intensify this. It was also revealed that KCL played a role in the newly announced Universal Studios theme park. This will be built next to the campus, along with new transport links, all underwritten by over a billion pounds of public money. In a way, KCL has become a symbol of the new government industrial policy: guns and butter popcorn.

As a branch, we have been organising to improve our working conditions, mainly around three areas: jobs, pay, and democracy. So far, we have had two industrial action ballots denied by UCU, but are continuing to organise towards industrial action.
While our London Weighting Allowance campaign might be unusual given what’s happening in the sector, it applies to workers across the campus unions, providing an important opportunity to take action together, rather than being divided into different campaigns. We cannot let KCL participate in a race to the bottom over conditions in higher education. This is also about defending conditions more widely and supporting colleagues in the sector - along with campaigning for the SoS dispute, of course!

In response to the news about Cranfield and the arms industry, we are arguing for a conscientious objection clause to be added to our contracts. This would support members who refuse to work on projects due to ethical or political concerns, taking control over what work we do. This is not only about Palestine and the arms industry, but a growing range of issues that are coming up in universities. We launched an open letter on conscientious objection alongside our consultative ballot. We are also collecting personal email addresses so we are prepared for electronic balloting for future industrial action.