For a moment during last year’s bitter marking and assessment boycott, it seemed as though the UK’s long-held commitment to collectively negotiating pay across its universities was starting to unravel.

Faced with the prospect of hundreds of students being unable to graduate – and with talks nationally at an impasse – Queen’s University Belfast blinked, handing staff an extra 2 per cent rise on top of the national offer of between 5 and 8 per cent if they agreed to clear the exam backlog as quickly as possible.

Queen’s was swiftly ejected from the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (Ucea) for breaking rank, and employers and unions alike waited nervously to see if the move would start a domino effect, prompting other wealthy institutions to take matters into their own hands and pay up.

In the event, no universities followed the Queen’s example, and when the in the drably named New JNCHES (Joint Negotiating Committee for ����Vlog Staff) process this year, the Northern Irish institution – now suspended from Ucea for three years – was the only notable exception apart from a small group of perennial refuseniks that includes Imperial College London and Nottingham Trent University.

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Yet despite the drama being removed from this year’s negotiations after the University and College Union (UCU) – the largest of the five unions involved – failed to secure a mandate for further industrial action, reaching an agreement has proved no less torturous.

Talks look set to break down without a deal on pay, as they have done repeatedly since the last time both sides reached an agreement way back in 2017. The result is that, yet again, the employers’ final offer (a basic rise of 2.5 per cent, with 5.7 per cent for the lowest paid) is likely to be imposed. The first part will be paid at least three months after it was due in people’s wage packets, although it will be backdated.

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For its supporters, collective pay bargaining remains an important principle, a guarantee of equality across institutions large and small, elite and non-elite, and one that puts UK higher education in a category closer to public entities such as schools and hospitals than the cut-throat corporate sector when it comes to attracting and retaining staff.

“There is such a thing as the university ideal that is holding them all together, even though these institutions have got such different priorities,” says Glen O’Hara, professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University. But, as strong as this bind can be, the sector is becoming “increasingly vociferous”, he says, and the fractures are becoming more and more evident.

In a financially constrained era when dog-eat-dog student recruitment rounds see some institutions hoover up applicants, leaving others spiralling into greater peril, how feasible is it that universities will retain their all-in-it-together approach to pay and conditions?

And if collective bargaining were ever to fall apart, what would that mean for the other common endeavours universities pursue – from behemoth pension schemes to efforts to protect time for research?

Given no choice but to go it alone, this year Queen’s followed up its marking boycott-ending deal by formulating a three-year agreement that will see its staff receive a total salary increase of 13 per cent, as well as bonuses and additional leave. Although the results of future national pay rounds are unknown, it would take several steep rises in the years ahead to leave staff at Queen’s worse off for their institution’s exile.

Ryan Feeny, the university’s vice-president for strategic engagement and external affairs, says some work was required to get the processes and governance changes in place to facilitate the deal but he hoped it would usher in a new period of stability.

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“We did feel some degree of frustration about the limitations of what we could do [in the national process],” he says. “The maximum increase is set by those institutions that have least financial flexibility. And for those institutions – generally the older universities – that maybe have a bit more financial flexibility, that is a bit frustrating.”

Queen’s may be open to rejoining Ucea in future, Feeny says, but no decisions have been made. “There is a way to go on [thinking about] whether this one-size-fits-all negotiation is sustainable,” he says. “It doesn’t feel as though it is from just repeatedly getting into the position where there is an impasse and then the imposition of a [settlement] and some disquiet from the trade unions – but that is for others to take a view on. We have had this experience; we’re content with where we’ve got to. We will have to take stock closer to the time to see what the landscape is like nationally at that point and what we are able to do.”

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One university less likely ever to go back into JNCHES is Nottingham Trent: at least, while its current vice-chancellor Edward Peck is still in charge.

Peck, once a member of Ucea’s board and a former NHS manager, has become one of the most outspoken critics of collective bargaining, instead choosing to negotiate local pay deals directly with his staff for the past few years.

He says that as the financial position of different institutions has “become more emphasised”, getting to a point at which all 140-odd UK universities involved in the process can decide upon a common position is “increasingly difficult”.

“From our point of view, there were settlements [when we were a member of Ucea] that were lower than we could afford, and we would have liked to have paid our people more,” Peck says. “Because of the rules of Ucea, once you are in, you are in: you have to go with what the national framework ends up delivering. That didn’t feel very appropriate given the hard work our colleagues put in to getting us into a strong position.”

For Peck, the autonomy most universities “protect passionately” should extend to the way they negotiate terms and conditions with staff. He says local negotiations have proved more productive, both in terms of pay – which has come in at slightly above the national level – and other things staff care about, such as holidays, healthcare and promotions. Universities have always been able to stipulate such things locally, but Peck says they tend to be neglected when the national focus is so heavily on salaries.

In contrast to the national stalemates, Nottingham Trent’s pay offers have been signed off by the unions and garnered wide support in staff-wide polls, allowing the institution to avoid the strikes and industrial action that have plagued the rest of the sector for much of the past decade.

Peck believes the notion that universities implement a common national pay structure is a fallacy anyway, pointing out that there can be large variations in what lecturers who ostensibly do the same job are paid at different universities because the national process only sets a pay spine upon which institutions plot their own grading structures. Those in professorial-level positions usually have their own individual contracts and any institution can suspend the national pay rise for 11 months if they have extenuating circumstances.

“I don’t for a second think we [at Nottingham Trent] are doing anything that somehow is breaking a perfectly formed and very consistent national reward model, because there isn’t one,” Peck says.

It is worth noting that national pay bargaining is unusual in the anglophone world. In Australia – often regarded as the UK sector’s closest cousin in structure – pay is set via “enterprise agreements” periodically agreed between individual institutions’ senior management and National Tertiary Education Union representatives.

The country’s national minimum standards for higher education act as a starting point for these agreements, says Peter Bentley, a policy adviser at the Innovative Research Universities mission group. This guarantees some standardisation but, in reality, pay is often set at a much higher level and the difference between the top-paying and bottom-paying universities is usually about 15 per cent. There is further differentiation in the non-financial elements of the agreements, with non-salary benefits higher at the more elite universities, Bentley adds.

All institutions monitor what is happening in other enterprise agreements, and the fear of getting left behind drives a certain homogeneity. Nevertheless, formulating a new enterprise agreement – usually due every three or four years – can still be tricky, resulting in many agreements continuing to be applied way beyond their notional expiry date because a new one hasn’t been agreed.

For advocates of national bargaining in the UK, the flexibility offered by the pay spine is one of its strengths, allowing universities the wiggle room to meet individual institutional needs while broadly remaining in line with other institutions.

In recent years, richer universities such as King’s College London and UCL have been able to use things such as London Weighting allowances and promotions to pay staff more without jeopardising the collective process.

“I don’t understand why [some universities] feel it shackles them,” says Jane Thompson, a longstanding bargaining and negotiations official with the UCU, who has worked on the national pay framework since it was first agreed in 2003.

The union’s fear is that other universities “will say they want out to do good things. But once they are out, what’s to stop them saying, ‘We don’t need to pay those people that much’? The whole point of having a national framework is that it keeps everybody up: it’s not just those at the very top.”

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Meanwhile, as an academic moving institutions, “you want to be able to know that you are walking into the same general conditions and pay as you had before”, says Dave Hitchcock, a reader in history at Canterbury Christ Church University and one of the founders of the UCU Commons group that is generally supportive of the leadership of current general secretary Jo Grady.

“That stability helps you make a choice and upend your life and go to wherever it is you are going. It is why [UK universities] struggle to recruit to overseas campuses: because the conditions are so different there.”

If employers and unions struggle to agree on much, a commitment to the idea of collective bargaining is one thing that does bind them. Raj Jethwa, who, as chief executive of Ucea, is ultimately the man tasked with representing employers in the negotiations, points out that it has survived Covid, tuition fee freezes, ups and downs in international student recruitment and the recent period of high inflation.

Universities must actively opt in to participate in every negotiating round and, every year, the vast majority do so because – in Jethwa’s view – “they prefer the idea of working in concert with their peers to ensure there is a single fair uplift across the sector. Fairness is a big part of it: the sense that there is a fair approach to staff regardless of where they work.”

Peck is less philosophical about the reasons more haven’t joined him in opting out. He puts it down to a combination of inertia, doubts about internal capacity to conduct negotiations and worries about getting stuck in an inflationary spiral.

And while the pressure on collective bargaining is generally felt to come from those who may wish to pay their staff more than the agreed amounts, being constrained by the nationally agreed position may work in favour of those that can pay more but don’t want to, says Oxford Brookes’ O’Hara: “If you are one of the universities sitting on a pile of money, you don’t want to blow all that on pay, do you? And you don’t want to compete with US salaries. So this is your excuse – and is probably one of the things that holds pay bargaining together.”

For its part, far from giving up on collectivisation, the UCU has attempted to channel more and more of its ambitions for a better workplace through the national pay process. The union’s “four fights” over pay, workloads, casualisation and equality have been its central refrain over the past few years, and Thompson believes there is room in the national pay process for employers to commit to high-level agreements on such issues that could then be interpreted locally. She says employers used to be more open to national standards: for instance, initiatives such as the post-92 contract guaranteed certain standards across all the institutions that became universities, with limits set on teaching time to protect research. But, while the UCU won its battle over cuts to the Universities Superannuation Scheme as economic conditions improved the pension scheme’s financial position, it has made precious little progress in its four fights.

“Employers nationally don’t want to touch anything other than pay,” says Thompson, “but we’ve forced them to talk to us about insecure employment, workloads and equality pay gaps. We think it is possible for them to say: ‘these things shouldn’t be happening, and these [other] things should’.” This year’s agreement does look set to include a commitment to reviewing the pay spine, together with a commitment to form several working groups to look at issues such as contract types, workloads and pay gaps.

Eradicating the use of zero-hours contracts is one area where Thompson feels there could have been an agreement in the current pay round. Such an agreement would probably have become redundant as the new Labour government moves to ban such contracts across the board, but universities – only a small and shrinking minority of which admit to using such contracts – “could have made a statement of [banning them] rather than wait for the law to change”, Thompson believes. “It would look much better to act before they are forced to.”

Jethwa says such additional demands are one of the many reasons that reaching an agreement on pay has become so hard, and he believes they pose inherent risks to the future of collective bargaining: “The moment you start to widen the New JNCHES remit and [require us to] respond to things that are, frankly, beyond what employers sign up for…their confidence might start to weaken and our ability to be an effective negotiating partner might start to weaken.”

There is value in spreading and sharing good practice, Jethwa says, but “if you want this to be part of a collective agreement nationally, that is not going to happen. If you want to address the issues [and] do something that reassures staff, we will find a forum to do it in.”

While the instinct within the sector, even at senior management level, is to be fairly collective, the financial strife many face is going to test this to the limits in the immediate future, according to Jonathan Simons, head of education practice at the consultancy Public First.

“Perhaps some universities have wanted to do things differently but not sufficiently to rock the boat when things are fine,” says Simons, who previously worked as head of education for the prime minister’s strategy unit. “But if you are a Russell Group institution, for example, when push comes to shove, you may want different things to some post-92s…and when things get difficult and the incentives are for people to splinter, the argument against [doing so] is purely one of principled belief in collective action. That is all very well and good, I’m not denying it. But it is hard when you place it up against the actual real calculations of harms being caused [by collective bargaining] when times are tough.”

Cracks are already being seen in post-92 universities’ participation in the government-run Teachers’ Pension Scheme, Simons points out, with, this summer, the University of Portsmouth becoming one of the first to go it alone after required employer contributions were raised by 5 percentage points to 28.68 per cent of salary. Portsmouth has set up a stand-alone company to employ its staff without having to offer them this expensive incentive. 

As the cost of pay and pensions rises higher than many institutions feel they can afford, more could follow Portsmouth’s example, Simons predicts.

Oxford Brookes’ O’Hara agrees that the financial crunch is forcing universities into seemingly oppositional positions. Per-institution caps on domestic student numbers are one example: “If you are a vice-chancellor of a big post-92, you are going to need some form of proportional cap on home students at the top just to bring order back to the system,” he says. But this would be detrimental to the interests of the expanding Russell Group members.

At the same time, distressed finances could unite universities behind common goals, O’Hara points out, especially calls for an emergency tuition fee rise or a lower regulatory burden. And even before Universities UK’s recent blueprint for the future of higher education suggested it, many observers were predicting that financial pressures could foster a new era of collaboration, with universities more likely to share staff and services, which could force greater homogenisation.

Ultimately however, Simons believes the drivers to split in the coming years are greater than those keeping institutions together. “I wouldn’t expect it to happen next year. Everyone’s instinct is to stick together for solidarity. It is a very collectivist sector,” he says. “Not many vice-chancellors will want to break. But it only takes a couple to do so and everyone’s calculus changes. You can see another two, three or four deciding it’s worth going it alone.”

More seriously, a group of universities could collectively decide to do pay negotiation in a different way together, Simons says: “That’s when you would really start to get the splintering. Once this thing moves, it moves pretty quickly. The whole premise of a collective deal only really works when it covers a lot of people. That’s how these things fall apart.”

For his part, UCU Commons’ Hitchcock says the national process can still function, but it would work better if it focused on agreeing multi-year deals.

“Every year we come back, and every year there is the same conversation about [whether the pay award should be] above or below inflation,” he says, with the union being beaten down until the argument becomes about whether “we get 2.5 or 3 per cent, both of which are risible. Instead, we should be asking where the sector thinks pay should be in four or five years’ time and [how] we get there, step by step, from this year.”

This would allow universities to “bake” any agreed pay rises into their financial planning. “And if that turns out to be advantageous to the employer, so what?” Hitchcock asks. “We got a solid deal, and we sacrificed the extra we might have got [through annual negotiations] for the stability.”

The last time a multi-year pay deal was agreed in the UK was 2006, covering a period that ended in an unforeseen global financial crisis that “bruised” the sector, according to Ucea’s Jethwa. Nevertheless, he says, there is some increasing interest among employers in looking beyond a yearly cycle again.

“Some of the things we talk about in terms of issues not to do with pay would benefit from…not having to negotiate a pay deal every year,” he says. “The drawbacks are that you need a degree of [financial] stability and certainty around it. We need to ensure inflation is reaching a much more secure trajectory and the funding for the sector needs to be a lot more certain.”

Whether universities stay together or choose to go it alone, institutional thinking needs to be more strategic than it currently is, says O’Hara.

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“What we are doing at the moment is drifting apart in a completely unplanned and unpolitical way,” he says. “Whereas, actually, if you are explicit about doing it, it is something you can govern.”