More than a third of Scotland’s colleges face having to find up to £1 million each from their existing budgets to fund pay deals agreed with teaching and support staff, a Tes Scotland investigation reveals.
The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) announced last month that it would give colleges an extra £2 million to ensure they could meet the costs of a pay agreement for lecturers. However, it has emerged that only 15 of the 26 SFC-funded colleges in Scotland will benefit from an initial £1.5 million instalment to help them fund the deals up to July 2018. The remaining £500,000 has not yet been allocated. Decisions will be made following “further discussions with Colleges Scotland and individual colleges”, according to an SFC circular published this week.
EIS teaching union general secretary Larry Flanagan said colleges had received sufficient funding for the pay deal.
Money ‘in the bank’
Colleges Scotland estimated that the payment to lecturing staff, agreed by the National Joint Negotiating Committee, will cost about £6.6 million, of which £1.8 million is due at the end of this month. The SFC said in its funding allocation for 2017-18 that there had been an uplift of £10.2 million in teaching grants for colleges, £8.2 million of which was to support pay and “other general pressures”.
Mr Flanagan said: “Both the Scottish government and Colleges Scotland said during the [pay] dispute that the funding for the pay harmonisation had been agreed and provided - ‘in the bank’ was the phrase used. Since then, additional money has been found to assist those colleges that were pleading special difficulties and this additional money was to assist them in meeting the agreement that Colleges Scotland has now signed up to twice. So the money is there and we expect colleges to deliver.” But, speaking anonymously, one college leader told Tes Scotland that, given all of the pressures faced by colleges - from the apprenticeship levy to new procured contracts - it was “disappointing” that all the extra cash provided by the funding council to alleviate these pressures had to be spent on pay for teaching staff. “The cake for colleges has a bigger slice, but for just one section of staff.”
It has also been revealed this week that there will be no additional money to help colleges fund the deal with support staff, which will see every member of staff receive an extra £425 a year if it is ratified.
The deal will cost the sector an estimated £2.3 million annually, according to support-staff union Unison. A spokesperson said this was “well affordable by the sector, given recent financial commitments to lecturing staff”. John Gallacher, Scottish organiser and FE lead for Unison, highlighted that this was the third consecutive year that Unison-led negotiations had resulted in a pay rise for some 5,500 workers in 20 Scottish colleges.
A Tes Scotland analysis reveals the estimated costs facing colleges over the next 12 months. For example, Edinburgh College faces a £256,997 increase in its support-staff pay bill. Combined with the pay increase for lecturers, the extra costs amount to about £1 million. Edinburgh reported the largest deficit of any college in its 2015-16 accounts, and last month told a parliamentary committee that it was making progress on reducing its deficit - although the full financial impact of the pay deal was at that point unclear.
Excluded from funding
Dundee and Angus College has also been excluded from the SFC’s £1.5 million funding. It will pay support staff an additional £156,145 a year, according to Tes Scotland’s analysis, leading to a combined cost from the two deals of £541,315 this year.
Meanwhile, at Forth Valley College, the cost is about £535,274.
Colleges will be expected to fund these cost increases from their grant allocations.
The estimates are based on the most recent available figures for the costs of the support-staff deal, published by the SFC earlier this year, using 2015-16 data.
Figures for the cost of the teaching-staff deal, provided to the SFC by Colleges Scotland, have previously been challenged by unions.
In April, Tes Scotland revealed that the vast majority of colleges were reporting a deficit for 2015-16, including nine of those having to fund those deals without extra SFC support.
A spokesman for the SFC told Tes Scotland: “We have allocated just over £1.5 million of additional funding to colleges to ensure they are able to meet the costs of the recent pay deal for lecturers until July 2018.
“As elsewhere in the public sector, decisions on future funding will form part of the next strategic spending review and we will see the outcome of that later this year.”
Shona Struthers, chief executive of Colleges Scotland, said: “We are working with the SFC and colleges to ensure that the pay element for lecturers for the period April 2017 to July 2018 will be paid in July 2017.
“Any funding for terms and conditions or pay beyond this period is subject to the outcome of future Scottish government spending reviews.
She added: “There is no additional funding for the support-staff pay award. It is the annual cost-of-living award that is expected to be met from existing funding; this includes the notional cost of additional annual leave.”
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