This year the University and College Union (UCU) will be marking its 20th anniversary. Drawing lessons from the two decades of its existence, BEA GARDNER explains how a genuinely combative member-led union can be built.
The University and College Union (UCU) was founded in 2006 following the merger of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which represented workers in the old universities, and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), which represented workers in colleges and new universities. As a result UCU became the largest post-16 education union in the world. UCU covers Higher Education (HE), Further Education (FE), Adult and Community Education (ACE) and prison education and has over 120,000 members organised in branches according to their employers and corresponding sector.
Twenty years on, workers across all the sectors UCU organises face unprecedented attacks on jobs, pay, pensions, and working conditions – a direct result of the failed marketised post-16 education system that is now in the depths of a severe funding crisis.
The Labour government, intent on serving the interests of the capitalist class, have offered no solution to the crisis. In fact, it has doubled down on the market model and given a green light for further cuts in the name of ‘specialisation’ in universities, and has introduced a 6% cut to the Adult Education and Skills fund, impacting colleges. The question is therefore posed as to whether the union is up to the task of defending and advancing the interests of workers across post-16 education in the face of such an onslaught.
Policies of successive Tory and Labour governments have marketised post-16 education and research. The incorporation of colleges in 1993, which removed further education and sixth form colleges from local authority control, and the introduction of university tuition fees in 1997 by Blair’s New Labour, were catalysts for this.
Both sectors have been defined by increased competition among institutions to attract maximum income from student fees, funding and grants, at the same time as reducing the proportion of income spent on staff pay in pursuit of maximising ‘surpluses’. There has been an increased use of deeply exploitative hourly-paid and sessional teachers, alongside attacks on pensions, real-term pay cuts, and an increase in workload.
In higher education, a more pronounced marketplace has emerged in Britain and globally. It has become one of Britain’s most valuable exports, bringing £32 billion to the UK economy annually – worth more than the automotive industry.
Yet, this marketplace is one within which a significant proportion of income comes in the form of government tuition fee loans and teaching grants. Continued austerity has seen fees frozen, and funding cut. Further Education income has fallen by a third since 2010/11.
In universities, the initial over-reliance on international fees to subsidise teaching and research is a model now failing because of a number of factors, including high fees alongside reduced post-study work opportunities and stricter visa restrictions. Now, the Office for Students has projected that 45% of higher education institutions will be in deficit this academic year, with one in four universities having closed an academic department this year.
The fightback needed
The solution, increasingly understood by UCU members themselves, is to take control out of the hands of the employers and the government, to fight for full funding for education and research across FE, HE and Adult Education. Such a campaign will require a political as well as industrial strategy – and poses the need for workers’ political representatives prepared to fight for those policies.
However, this is not the kind of lead that current general secretary, Jo Grady, and her senior team are prepared to give, because it would inherently involve coming into conflict with the government and the capitalist class.
Already, the conditions in post-16 education have compelled members to fight back. In fact, members have engaged in local and national industrial action at a higher rate than their counterparts in other education and public sector unions, including a series of aggregated national action in HE and disaggregated coordinated actions in FE and prisons. This is not due to a militant leadership, but the pressure members have been able to put on the leadership to back action. However, the actions of the national leadership within those disputes have sought to curtail and wind down action at the earliest possibility.
The scale of this objective crisis confronting workers across the sectors UCU organises in means there is potential for far greater coordinated national action than has been the case so far, especially within HE. Record numbers of UCU branches are in local dispute to defend members’ jobs. But this wave of local action has not been nationally coordinated or linked to a political struggle against the market model and for full funding.
Instead, Grady and her officials, backed by her supporters on the National Executive Committee (NEC), are continuing to evade a serious struggle on all of the key issues; at every stage, neglecting entirely the role of the national union and leadership in building such confidence by giving a political lead. They zigzag between arguing for the legal impossibility of national action at one moment, then parroting the idea that members are not ‘ready’ for such a battle at the next.
Grady has been critical of the TUC for being an organisation that will not confront the Labour government, yet she sits on its general council and could spearhead a fight within the TUC for such an approach. She has failed, for example, to act on instructions from UCU congress and the NEC to propose that the TUC name a date for an anti-austerity demonstration.
Grady states that Labour is on ‘borrowed time’, but has taken no steps towards seriously implementing UCU congress motion 63 on new political representation, which includes encouraging UCU members to stand in elections. She has not worked with the other unions to take steps towards a party based on the working class, that fights in workers’ interests, despite playing a role in the ‘Enough is Enough’ project, launched by some union leaders in 2022. She has, instead, it seems, deferred to the Green Party as the answer, including inviting Zack Polanski to address the 2026 UCU congress.
Such evasion of a serious strategy on all these fronts stems from the outlook of Grady and the senior officials around her. They see the role of the trade union movement as one limited to lobbying the capitalist class and capitalist politicians. The trade union leaders cannot conceive of the working class representing itself or of the working class taking power.
Ineffective leadership
This is the context for the internal struggle within the union, currently being expressed in debates about democracy and what it means to be ‘member-led’ and in the dispute of UCU staff. This also reflects the dual character of trade unions, including the UCU.
As a mass organisation made up of post-16 education and research workers, undoubtedly the union has the potential to be a powerful vehicle to defend and advance the interests of those workers. Yet, the union’s leadership, particularly the general secretary alongside the unelected senior executives of the union, are politically and economically distanced from the membership, affecting their outlook and interests. The current general secretary’s annual salary is in excess of £140,000 with an additional £20,000 in benefits.
Increasingly within UCU, the senior management team operate as a privileged trade union officialdom. This was reflected in the formation of a breakaway union through the unilateral recognition of a union specifically for UCU managers and was one of the accelerating factors in the dispute with UCU staff organised in Unite the Union.
General secretary Jo Grady’s capitulation has been particularly stark, given she emerged as a leading figure within the 2017-18 USS pension dispute. She stood neither as the ‘continuity candidate’ who was supported by the right of the union, nor as the left candidate backed by the UCU Left.
She was nevertheless considered by members as a left candidate, having played a visible role in the ‘no capitulation’ moment of 2018, when former general secretary Sally Hunt (in office from 2006 to 2019) attempted to call off the strike action prematurely and without the consultation of members.
Yet, in her first term of office, Jo Grady pulled very similar manoeuvres to Hunt with the undemocratic ‘pause’ of the 2023 combined USS pension and pay disputes. She also failed to implement the conference decision of a summer re-ballot, which resulted in those participating in the marking and assessment boycott not having a mandate to continue.
The role of both general secretaries in being a barrier to effective action is not incidental or due to individual failings, but reflects the huge pressure asserted by the capitalist class onto the trade union leadership to act in their interests. And that can at times involve the unions operating as a ‘release valve’ for workers’ anger, rather than channelling that pressure into a broader struggle.
Democratic control of disputes and the union is therefore an important demand; among other measures, the Socialist Party calls for elected officials and no elected officer to earn more than the average wage of the members they represent, as a countermeasure to the creeping influence of the capitalist class.
However, within UCU, it is the right that is seeking to defend the actions of the general secretary, pushing the current debate on democracy. It is therefore a shield for what is at heart, political differences over strategy and the role of the union.
A member-led union?
Grady’s 2024 re-election manifesto stated, “representatives that attend and vote at democratic events on behalf of members are often not properly answerable to those members”. It stated “our structures are archaic and inaccessible: we would not design them this way if we were making them today” and committed to a “formal review to examine all current structures, with the aim of modernising the union”.
The “more open and member-led union” that Grady and her supporters in the ‘Campaign for Union Democracy’ grouping advocate for bypasses the branch-based representative democracy of UCU, within which UCU congress is the policy-making body of the union.
They advocate for the use of all-member surveys and consultations. Currently, key proponents are seeking to establish a precedent that rule changes are passed by all member votes, instead of the required two-thirds majority at congress. In other words, they advocate for a form of plebiscitary democracy.
While tools such as surveys and consultative votes can play a part in helping appraise the mood of members and their appetite for action, in UCU, e-consultations and all-member votes have instead been used cynically to overturn democratic decisions and to stifle debate.
There have been centrally determined questions that conflate issues or do not include an option that members would have wanted to see. Results have been used to criticise decisions taken by the lay leadership on the NEC and sub-committees, or strong-arm them to follow a course of action predetermined by the general secretary, which overturns decisions taken at UCU congress.
Member and branch ‘consultation’ has, in actuality, been used to preside over delays that derail the momentum of industrial action, as happened in this year’s New Deal for FE dispute. The protracted processes of consultation with branches over the next steps contributed to all but four of the 17 colleges that took coordinated action in January dropping out of the dispute.
Clearly, this conflict over ‘democracy’ is not an abstract question of democratic principles, but a reflection of the internal struggle within the union between those who want UCU to be a fighting union and those who do not.
Socialist programme and democratic structures
This internal conflict is not specific to UCU. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, it brings to a head the opposing class interests. Increasingly, the trade union leaders will find themselves unable to resolve the issues confronting workers based on appeals for concessions alone.
They cannot see a resolution to issues confronting UCU members within the constraints and framework of capitalism – and are unwilling to lead a fight that challenges it. If they are not prepared to lead and back workers in that kind of struggle, then they will instead resort to increasingly top-down bureaucratic methods to contain and manage the power of the union from being fully expressed.
Consequently, getting drawn into a debate on upholding the current democratic processes is not the most effective way to take on the right. Though it is understandable that frustrations in the blatant overriding of existing UCU rules and processes have led some left activists within the union down this route.
From the standpoint of UCU members, what is most important is genuine participation in a discussion about the way forward; the demands, tactics and strategy for the union. Not treating formalised democratic structures as morally sacrosanct in the absence of this.
Grady’s ‘modernising the union’ survey and report confirms this. The report shows members were most supportive of “deliberative engagement”, like discussion with reps or colleagues, compared to ballots or surveys. Fewer than half of the members who had participated in an e-survey said they were effective.
The recommendation of the Labour Research Department, which conducted the survey, was to “ensure e-consultations are linked to democratic structures and not used to bypass them”. It went on to discuss that members have a desire to not just be consulted, but also to present views and shape outcomes.
Which is why, whilst UCU’s representative democracy should be defended, the most effective way of doing this is by arguing for a clear fighting, socialist programme within the existing democratic structures, putting forward a serious industrial and political strategy that UCU members can mobilise around.
The rotten role of the leadership is best exposed by putting demands on them to fight for this. UCU members have consistently demonstrated their determination to fight. It is not sufficient to denounce the actions of the current leadership without offering a clear programme of what is needed to take this fight forward.
Building a genuine broad left
A broad left within the union can play a key role in this process. A genuinely democratic, broad left would bring together all who are opposed to the leadership and want the union to fight for its members. It would operate as a forum for discussing and agreeing on the programme, strategy and tactics linked to an appraisal of the current mood of members and the appetite for action.
By simultaneously building and winning support for this agreed strategy across all levels of the union, maximum pressure can be put onto the leadership and senior officials to implement agreed congress and sector conference decisions.
Within such a formation, an open discussion between various left groups and activists can take place to agree on a single left slate for the elections, giving the strongest opposition and challenge to the right.
However, the existing left in the union does not operate in this way. Consequently, UCU Left, which is dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), has not fulfilled the potential to transform the union or seriously challenge for leadership. This stems largely from the limited political perspectives of the SWP, alongside undemocratic organising methods.
Much of the analysis around UCU left written for Socialism Today to mark the sixth anniversary of UCU remains true: “UCU Left does not extend deep into UCU’s rank and file. While a handful of branches are run by UCU Left, entire regions of UCU exist with only a few UCU Left members. The group is strongest in London region, which is also where all its meetings take place [… ]The composition of UCU Left’s elected committee is obscure and its decisions unaccountable. Its publications rarely circulate beyond UCU Left and so serve as ‘notes for action’ for a thin, already-attuned activist list, rather than as agitational material to activate rank-and-file members”. (Socialism Today No.159, June 2012)
Added to this has been the SWP’s internal crisis of 2013, which continues to repel a layer of activists, including former members.
One response to the narrow factionalism of UCU Left is for members to reject organised groupings within the union, seeing bureaucratic power struggles between different groupings coming at the expense of members.
This is not inherent. It is entirely understandable for members with aligned views and positions to organise among themselves to argue for that position within the structures of the union. However, an inward-looking left that does not appeal to the rank and file will not be able to mobilise the support needed to implement its programme, even if it wins certain positions or policies within the union.
Therefore, it is the case that the ineffectiveness of the organised left is contributing to the current stalemate in the union, being unable to mobilise the pressure needed to overcome the obstacles imposed by the right on a longer-standing basis.
Potential for transformation
This is despite there being no shortage of opportunities to transform the union, even within its short history. In fact, failure to do this has set the union back, particularly within HE and allowed the right to consolidate its position. The 2018-2023 USS pension dispute is a notable example of this process.
A reported 17,000 new members joined the union in the first few months of the dispute, and a new generation of union activists gained experience of action. Through this, they were confronted by the barriers posed by trade union bureaucracy and the ‘old guard’ within existing branches.
When Sally Hunt issued a statement outlining an ‘agreement’ with Universities UK in March 2018, suggesting strikes would be called off and that teaching would be rescheduled, the reaction from members on social media was one of visceral rage. Within less than 24 hours, all but two of the branches on strike had organised emergency meetings and voted to reject the deal.
Well over a thousand demonstrated outside the UCU national office as the union’s higher education committee met to discuss the offer. This mobilisation of members forced the leadership to drop the planned suspension of the action.
Social media played a role in members discussing the way forward. But as members of the Socialist Party wrote at the time “social media is not a substitute for a fighting, democratic and member-led union – the energy and militancy of the strikers must be channelled into transforming UCU”.
At the local branch level, there were steps in this direction. Rank-and-file members contested committee positions at many UCU branches. In Southampton, the president and vice-president positions were won by the rank-and-file activists as part of a slate of candidates that first became active in the wake of the 2018 strike and went on to politically lead the 2019/20 disputes.
Yet this potential network of new reps and activists was not brought together into a broad organisation within UCU, and failures to cohere the rank-and-file left-leaning activist layer within the union enabled Grady to derail the 2023 action. The consequences are still being felt; it knocked the confidence of ordinary members in the union, particularly the national union leadership, and contributed to a degree of despondency among the new activist layer.
Need for left unity
It was this, and not increased support for Grady and her supporters, that contributed to Grady’s re-election in 2024. In fact, there were three opposing candidates standing against Grady; further evidence of the failure of the left to win broad layers looking to challenge the leadership to work together. Sixty-five percent of the first-preference votes went to the three opposition candidates, and there were fewer than 200 votes between Grady and second-place candidate Ewan McGaughey.
Jo Grady’s conduct during that election has been subject to a complaint made by two of the opposing candidates to the certification office, with reports that she misused union resources to aid her campaign. Messages in a WhatsApp chat, which included members of the senior management team, are alleged to show Grady saying “From now on, every single decision we make/thing we do has to be seen through the lens: 1. win dispute, 2. re-elect GS [general secretary], 3. rid union of SWP [Socialist Workers Party]”. It is also claimed that she told members of the chat that “we will destroy” people in the union who opposed her.
However, the main reason for the narrow victory was not the misuse of union resources. Rather, the general secretary’s results confirmed the Socialist Party’s analysis that had the left groupings come together to agree a single candidate on a left programme, they could have stood a serious chance of winning. The combined first preference vote for the two candidates, Saira Weiner and Vicky Blake, was higher than Grady’s vote.
This is not the first time that the left vote has been split. In fact, the founding conference of the UCU left in November 2007 voted to endorse Roger Kline. Yet another active UCU left member, Pete Jones, did not withdraw from the election. Throughout UCU’s history, there has been a variety of left independents standing in union elections, sometimes part of and sometimes separate to the UCU Left slate.
In the recent 2026 NEC election, incumbent Socialist Party member Duncan Moore re-stood for election and appealed to the left to agree on a single left slate. The response of the SWP was that unless Duncan joined the UCU Left, they would be unwilling to discuss this. The UCU Left stood three candidates for the three UK elected FE seats, in effect, standing against an incumbent, although they eventually conceded to suggesting a fourth preference for Duncan.
In the end, Duncan won the second-highest number of first preference votes, with an increased vote from his last election. Nevertheless, that kind of imposed bureaucratic control over the left slate has contributed to a fragmented left not only in electoral challenges, but also in terms of developing a vehicle for mobilising across the union.
Learning the lessons
As of 2025/26, the NEC of the union, plus the officer positions, are in the control of the pro-Grady wing in the union. Yet, given the profound crisis confronting UCU members in and outside the workplace, the fighting mood of HE and FE members cannot be held back indefinitely. Continued austerity and prospects for further economic instability with rising costs of living will only intensify the need to mount nationwide collective action.
The lessons of the past twenty years are that while such breakthroughs in struggle are inevitable, victories will depend on whether that mood can be sustained and translated into a serious strategy of escalating action, which fights for the political as well as industrial demands.
Through their experience, increased numbers of UCU members will draw the conclusion that to mount such a fight will require the transformation of the union and the election of a fighting leadership. The lessons of the past 20 years of UCU lay bare the necessity of cohering all those who have already drawn this conclusion, to lay the groundwork for the new rank-and-file activists that will be born out of the struggles of the future.
The impasse posed by capitalist parties unwilling to implement policies in the interests of the working class will intensify the need for the struggle to not be limited to the industrial sphere. Increasing numbers of trade unionists will see the need to join forces in the creation of a political party based on the working class to wage a political struggle too.
Socialists armed with a clear perspective and programme can play a key role in speeding up all of these processes.