🆘 How to have a dispute over funding? 🆘

1. UCEA - tell us they can’t settle over our demands for job security with the current funding model

2. HERA - SoS controls funding model!

3. TULRCA - in public sector, if employers can’t resolve a dispute workers can escalate to the SoS

So… we need to escalate from a dispute with our employer body over terms and conditions, including job security, to a dispute with the SoS over these conditions.

This would be new terrain industrially and legally. Branches supporting the strategy commissioned legal advice from Alan Boggs. The legal advice we received is positive, but cautious. 

At UCU Congress 2025, motion HE14 was passed unanimously and to a greatly enthusiastic response. The UCU General Secretary went on BBC radio the following morning to announce it. This made this strategy officially part of UCU’s business, yet there was almost no progress and at Congress 2026 X motion pushed for it to be placed urgently on the agenda. 

The UCU Higher Education Committee (HEC) have commissioned further legal advice. HEC are saying, behind closed doors, that the dispute cannot go ahead without any further discussion with the membership. UCU have stalled, with no alternative plan for a national strategy to save the sector on offer. 

Now, 23 UCU branches are calling on HEC to requisition a Special Higher Education Sector Conference (SHESC). 

The special conference would be a democratic space to talk about the 🆘 dispute and what it would take to make it happen. There has been a precedence for an 🆘 dispute (details of Teachers Union dispute)…

Branches have no choice but to act. we can’t leave the national union to devolve to a network of branches – we have no power that way. This conference is the start of us claiming the national space of our union to pursue a national industrial strategy for the sector.