Further education lecturers took a second day of strike action in pursuit of a cost-of-living pay increase this week, despite negotiations taking place in an attempt to avert further disruption.

This was the third time in three years that Scottish lecturers had been forced to take industrial action in the face of an intransigent management side.

A year after strike action in 2017, we found ourselves balloting once again for industrial action. Lecturers have not had a cost-of-living rise since April 2016.

Glasgow City Council has just settled a £500 million equal-pay deal, and no one has suggested that those workers should not get a cost-of-living pay rise. Many of our members got little or nothing through our equal-pay deal - and we cannot accept a situation where we fought for equal pay, only to see it immediately devalued by inflation.

One outcome of 2017 and the “lessons learned” was the need for accurate, agreed data relating to the cost of future deals. To this end, we agreed that the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) would act as an independent body to “validate” data for both sides.

The SFC undertook this process for the revised claim submitted by the EIS union in December 2018 - a three-year cost-of-living pay rise based on public sector pay policy and similar to the settlement already agreed with support staff.

The support-staff deal had been costed by Colleges Scotland and validated by the SFC at about £14 million back in September 2018. It came as some surprise, then, when the EIS’ broadly similar claim was returned with an estimated cost of more than £31 million.

It appears that different methodologies were applied to the two deals. Both are valid calculations, but they are not comparable.

This inconsistency raises questions over how seriously the employers’ association is taking the negotiation process. Why would it apply different standards in its calculations of our claim with strike action looming?

Pam Currie is president of the EIS Further Education Lecturers’ Association