This network has grown out of the university rank-and-file dayschools, which have been happening since March 2024. These dayschools started in response to the emerging redundancy crisis in Higher Education (HE) and have been a space for university workers to come together, share resources, skills, and plan for building rank-and-file power across the sector. We organised six dayschools in 2024, which were open to anyone who worked in a university. They focused on collective discussions around funding cuts, redundancies, casualisation, Palestine solidarity, industrial organising and building cross-union power.
Within these dayschools we developed a survey of branches to try to understand the state of union organisation across the sector. We realised that not all institutions had active union branches with basic structures, and that day-to-day participation varied massively. We wanted to understand what workers in their branches actually needed in order to facilitate rank and file union organisation. By this, we mean a form of organisation which is worker-led and facilitates participatory democratic engagement in decision making, strategy, and campaigning. As a result, workers within the dayschools collectively produced a series of resources, including a guide to organising against redundancies, a university workers’ guide to building an anti-casualisation network and campaign, and developed an organising guide for rebuilding branches.
Alongside producing resources for rank-and-file organisation at a branch level, we discussed the escalating redundancy crisis in HE, as well as the absence of a national strategy from our unions, and in January 2025, we put out a call for submissions in order to discuss how to respond to the intensifying crisis. We began a process of collectively working through the various submissions and discussing concrete plans for a national funding campaign. We discussed how we wanted to build cross-union networks, avoid the pitfalls of sectionalism, bring students into a campaign on HE funding, and fight together to close the university with our strikes. We also discussed how three of the UCU’s Four Fights (Pay Inequality, Casualisation and Workload) had been stripped from the pay claim, but could be brought into the centre of our struggles.
The strategy of pursuing a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over the funding model for HE developed out of these collective discussions. As a rank-and-file collective, we agreed that such a strategy required legal advice, the funds for which we raised via our respective branches. This involved further conversations with members, branch representatives and branch committees. This resulted in many UCU branches (including Queen Mary, Goldsmiths, Kingston, Essex, UAL, Durham, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford, Nottingham, and UCL) passing local motions in support of the recent UCU Higher Education Sector conference motion (HE14).
This motion committed the UCU to urgently explore opening a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over HE funding; coordinate with other HE unions and students to build wide support for the dispute; and campaign to build awareness and support for the dispute. While this motion was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in May 2025, the long-term success of the strategy and dispute still very much depends on a broad rank and file campaign. We therefore called a series of national meetings across June and July, to explore how to organise a trade dispute over funding in HE. This felt like a daunting task, especially given how many of us are engaged in local disputes, fighting redundancies and cuts within our branches. However, it was clear from these meetings that many of us realise the underlying causes of our local struggles, as well as those over pay and conditions more broadly, are structural, and the current HE fee-based funding model is core to that. While pursuing a trade dispute over funding is something distinct from our local disputes, it is also about linking up these multiple defensive struggles we are involved in and getting on the front foot to challenge the root causes going forward. In a moment of crisis within the sector, this feels vital.
As a result of these recent national meetings, multiple UCU branches have passed a post-congress motion, committing to help organise a national dispute over funding. In addition, a series of new regional and cross-union rank and file groups and dayschools have been set up in order to contribute to this organisation. By collectively working on this strategy in this way, we hope it will not only further our fight for HE, but also energise the form of participatory, worker-led organisation across branches, which has given rise to this campaign. Together, we are building a cross-branch, cross-union, reps network in higher education.