A single mother who does not know how to make ends meet, despite working long hours teaching. An experienced lecturer whose workload became so overwhelming that she reduced her hours to part-time. An engineering teacher who could earn significantly more by working in industry, but lives “month to month”. A lecturer who, after 16 years in the sector, knows that her students’ experience is adversely affected by high staff turnover.

As the issue of stagnating pay in English colleges has come to the fore in recent weeks - not least when it emerged that a government-funded pay rise for schoolteachers would not be extended to their counterparts in colleges - more and more stories of staff struggling to survive have started to emerge.

But while the college workers mentioned above share daily challenges, they do not work in the same institution. In fact, these four teachers do not even work in the same education system.

Despite the fact that education is devolved from Westminster to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, lecturers across the UK are in dispute with their employers over pay - and strike action could well be on the cards in all four home nations.

In England, 85 per cent of University and College Union (UCU) staff who voted in a ballot over pay backed a strike - although, thanks to stringent new requirements, only four colleges had a high enough turnout to press ahead with industrial action. Meanwhile, 91 per cent of UCU members in Welsh colleges backed a strike over pay and workload, calling on employers to make a better offer to avert action in the coming weeks. In Scotland and in Northern Ireland, too, the offers tabled by colleges have been rejected, and ballots are the likely next step.

With a shared cause and concerns over pay and conditions across the home nations’ further education sectors, what similarities are there in how staff are remunerated?

The complex variety of collective bargaining arrangements and funding mechanisms in use makes it notoriously difficult to compare salary levels. But, ahead of chancellor Philip Hammond’s Autumn Budget next week - realistically the last chance for a U-turn on college pay before next year’s Spending Review - union officials across the UK have opened up their data on exactly how much college lecturers are paid, from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth, and from Belfast to Brighton.

The discrepancies that these figures reveal are significant. The variation is greatest in England, where colleges are free to ignore national pay deals agreed on their behalf and set their own levels. The average salary among lecturers at Solihull College and University Centre - the institution with the lowest pay, according to the UCU - is barely above £22,000, which is half that on offer at London’s Lambeth College. A spokesman for Solihull, however, says the UCU figure does not include all full-time, contracted lecturers.

Significant variation

Across the home nations, a more nuanced picture emerges - and some of the findings are counterintuitive. While it is well-known that average pay for college teachers in England is £7,000 behind that for schoolteachers, it has now emerged that it is also £5,000 lower than the figure for college teachers in Scotland. And as Scottish colleges continue the process of harmonising pay across institutions, lecturers there look set to pull away even further.

Meanwhile, college staff in Wales and Northern Ireland are on common pay scales - jealously guarded by the unions - but average salaries lag behind those in England.

In spite of these diverging salaries, there is more uniting college staff across the UK than dividing them, according to Howard Stevenson, professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Nottingham.

“The post-economic crisis fear is giving way to frustration,” he says. “You see this in lots of different places. There’s a narrative about emerging from recession. You see frustration around pay stagnation that’s been pent up; it looks to me as though people are increasingly willing to challenge it.

“Initially, I think people were willing to accept [no pay rises] in order to hang on to their jobs by their fingernails. But they are not feeling that now. In the meantime, they have seen some parts of the economy ripping away from the rest. Across the public sector, people are saying, ‘It’s our turn to have some of this so-called recovery.’ ”

Staff at colleges in Scotland appear to be some of the first beneficiaries of this movement. Following the reintroduction of national bargaining, the harmonisation deal agreed by the teaching union EIS-FELA and the employers’ association means that every lecturer will gradually be moved on to a single pay scale, with a highest point of £40,026 by April 2019. For many lecturers, this means a large increase in salary during the transition period. This is particularly true for those working at small, rural colleges.

Pay rises that would provoke gasps of shock from colleagues in England have become commonplace. Some lecturers at West Highland College will receive a huge 72 per cent increase in their pay between 2016 and 2019; the other main beneficiaries include some of their peers at Shetland College (55 per cent), North Highland College (45 per cent) and Orkney College (35 per cent).

Garry Ross has been a lecturer at West College Scotland in Paisley for a decade. As a “band 2 promoted lecturer”, he earns £42,891 per year, and is halfway through the migration towards a £43,850 salary. His 66 days of holiday - significantly more than his colleagues across the UK are entitled to - are protected under the agreement between college management and unions.

But while the increases in individual lecturers’ pay packets may appear huge, this is simply about ironing out the significant variation that had emerged, Ross insists. “[They’re] saying some people are getting massive pay increases, and that is not the whole story. We have had a cost-of-living increase of 2.5 per cent over the past three years. Money is quite tight. I am struggling to think of anyone who can put their hand on their heart and say they are sitting comfortably. I am living month to month.”

The introduction of national bargaining, and the harmonisation process that followed, was a positive step for the sector, Ross believes. “Regardless of whether you are a lecturer in Dumfries or Dundee, lecturing staff, like schoolteachers, should know they can move and will be paid the same rate and receive the same conditions,” he says.

A similarly structured - albeit significantly lower - pay scale is in place in Northern Ireland. Teachers at all colleges are paid according to a single scale, which, for lecturers, has five points, ranging from £22,605 to £32,778.

Jennifer Redmond teaches essential skills (literature and ICT) at entry level at South Eastern Regional College (SERC). She works part-time (0.75 of a full-time post) and earns around £22,000 a year.

“We have not had a pay rise since 2014. I don’t qualify for anything like Child Tax Credit, so what I get paid is basically what I get,” she says. “I go to Citizens Advice, and they say I should quit my job - I would be better off [without it] … I don’t know how they expect us to survive. You have to think, do you put the electric on or do you put food on the table? And workload is increasing every year.” Redmond’s passion for the job is the reason why she has stayed. “I could be working in Tesco for the same money, and I wouldn’t have the responsibility for the young people and I would have less stress,” she says. “But I love teaching.”

As in Northern Ireland, teaching staff in Wales are paid according to one common pay scale applied by all colleges. Currently, that means they are on one of six spine points between £22,826.92 and £33,162.44.

For Wendy Powell, a lecturer at Coleg Sir Gâr’s Pibwrlwyd Campus who has been teaching business in colleges since 1999, workload has become the overwhelming concern. “The workload is just getting out of control, especially the admin we are expected to do,” she says. “I have reduced my hours to part-time, because it was just too much. I work three days now, but I work more than that because of the admin and to make sure I keep up with my preparations. I come in on my days off - that is how I manage.”

Less pay, more work

If she were working full-time, Powell says, she would be on a salary of £39,000. On a part-time salary, though, paying the bills is a struggle: “I am really finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.” Annual pay rises of no more than 1 per cent in recent years have not helped.

“I enjoy my job and I enjoy the teaching,” Powell adds. “Until three years ago, you used to have time off the teaching timetable to do things like quality checking or to be a course tutor. Now you have a full teaching timetable and you still have to do [extra duties]. A 20 per cent [real-terms] pay cut and more work to do - there is now more staff turnover than there ever has been.”

In contrast to the other home nations, England is now the only country where pay agreements are negotiated at local level. This brings its own challenges, according to Alison Chapman, a lecturer in business studies at City College Plymouth. “We have to knock on the door of the people we know and ask for more money,” she says.

Pay varies significantly for colleges in England. Among the 166 colleges that responded to a freedom of information request by the UCU, 74 reported an average salary for qualified lecturers of below £30,000 in 2017. At the other end of the spectrum, two colleges - Blackburn and Lambeth - reported an average salary higher than £40,000 for their qualified teaching staff.

Chapman feels that there is too little accountability for the principals who are setting the pay of their staff. “The people who decide our pay are on eye-watering salaries and have little longevity in the job - they just move on.”

She started working in learning support 16 years ago and is now at the top of the lecturer scale at her institution, earning about £32,000. There has not been much of a pay increase in recent years, she says, adding: “We have had 0.5 per cent twice, and one rise of 1 per cent. That is a cut of 21 per cent in real terms.

“People don’t want to stick around in the college. People at the lowest end of the scale don’t have enough to live on.”

But staff have been told by officials that even offering a modest 2 per cent increase would result in redundancies, Chapman adds.

The bodies representing colleges across the UK say that, while they would love to offer staff a significant pay rise, the funding pressures they operate under have made this impossible.

According to Iestyn Davies, chief executive of Colleges Wales, this year’s pay negotiations have proved particularly problematic. “Austerity has created artificial constraints on the rate at which increases are offered,” he says. “If the employers’ resources are increased by 1 per cent, the pay increase is only going to be 1 per cent. And it is a matter of public record that the Welsh government’s public sector priority continues to be the health service. Those spending priorities, along with austerity, have really dug deep into the ability of FE institutions to pay an increase beyond the cost of living.”

The same issues apply to Scottish FE, according to Colleges Scotland. The pay demands from the teaching union EIS-FELA are “unaffordable for the sector”, it says, adding that the overall effect on staff pay from harmonisation and annual pay rises equates to a 12.2 per cent increase between 2016 and 2019 - a pay rise that lecturers in England can only dream of.

For staff unhappy with the status quo, the only way to make their voices heard is to strike. But for an individual lecturer, struggling to make ends meet, whether or not to sacrifice a day’s pay to take industrial action is a difficult decision, Redmond argues. “Can I afford to lose a day’s pay? Maybe if I had [a partner] also earning, but I am on my own. I would be reluctant to strike. But then what else can we do? Is this the only way they are going to listen?”

The disconnect between politicians stressing the importance of FE while failing to fund a pay rise for the workforce behind it has long dogged the sector, says the University of Nottingham’s Stevenson.

“People will say all the right things, but it might come down to something as crude as electoral calculations. I’m not sure that money in FE, even though it is desperately needed, is something that politicians see has got much capital for them. That’s why it is perennially neglected.”

But encouraging signs have emerged in recent weeks. In England, the Association of Colleges and the staff unions have set aside their traditional rivalries to unite behind the #LoveOurColleges campaign, calling for better funding for the sector. The focal point of the Colleges Week series of events was a rally and lobby of Parliament, with 3,000 staff and students descending on Westminster to make their voices heard.

Institutions are also increasingly turning to innovative tactics to attract media attention: New City College in London took the unprecedented step of closing for the day to allow staff and students to attend the protest, and took out a full-page advert in the Evening Standard to explain its decision. Students at Chesterfield College recorded a protest song about the impact of cuts on their experience. And a petition for better funding set up by students at Brockenhurst College attracted tens of thousands of signatures.

This growing public profile, combined with the “upsurge” in the pay expectations of college staff across the UK, could well mark a turning point, says Stevenson. “The sector is getting much better at presenting itself publicly - you see that from employers and the unions with all the social media campaigns.

“I suspect there’s always been a feeling [among politicians] that you can almost just say things to pacify the sector; that you might be able to get away with not actually following through with increasing resources. Part of the challenge for the trade unions is the extent to which they can mobilise to counteract that. In my mind, there is no doubt that this is a phenomenon. The recovery is well established: now it’s payback time.”

Julia Belgutay is an FE reporter for Tes

How is college pay set across the UK?

England

Staff unions negotiate with the Association of Colleges, which then makes a recommendation for an annual pay increase. However, this offer is not binding, and colleges have frequently made smaller awards - or none at all. In one extreme case, staff at Amersham and Wycombe College have not received an annual pay rise for 10 years. This year, colleges have said that financial constraints mean an increase of more than 1 per cent is not affordable without additional government support - a claim rejected by the unions. The University and College Union (UCU) has conducted a ballot over strike action in the event that no better pay rise is tabled by the colleges.

Northern Ireland

Katharine Clarke, the UCU’s Northern Ireland official, says there has been no free collective bargaining in the sector since 1997. “It has had a profoundly adverse impact upon pay, living standards and the ability to recruit into the sector,” she adds. Since 2014, lecturers have not received a pay increase at all. Under government pay controls, increases have to be absorbed within budget allocations, and the 1 per cent public sector pay cap increase is only approved when employers demonstrate the affordability of their business case. In recent years, this has repeatedly been rejected by the province’s economy and finance departments. Clarke says ongoing budgetary pressures have led to employers refusing to honour a contractual pay agreement, which the unions intend to challenge in court. An indicative ballot for industrial action is also planned.

Scotland

Pay is negotiated between the Colleges Scotland employers’ association and trade unions - negotiations take place separately for support and teaching staff. A deal to harmonise pay and core conditions for teaching staff is in place, but the two sides are currently in dispute over the employers’ offer of a 2.5 per cent cost-of-living increase over three years - which lecturers’ union EIS-FELA says would represent a real-terms cut. The union is calling for an unconsolidated, flat-rate pay rise of £1,000 on all salary points in year 1, rising to £2,000 in year 2, and £5,500 in year 3. A Colleges Scotland spokesman says: “This demand would take average pay to an unsustainable £45,033 - a 24.7 per cent rise - costing colleges an additional £60 million, which is unaffordable for the sector.”

Wales

Bargaining is carried out collectively between employers and the trade unions, with Colleges Wales facilitating. Any offer is then legally implemented by individual institutions. Unlike in England, as yet, no college has deviated from the national agreements. There is a common contract in place for all teaching staff, as well as a national pay scale. While teachers in schools will receive a pay increase boosted by extra government funding - similar to the agreement in England - no such funding has so far been confirmed for FE lecturers. Employers would like any such offer to extend to support staff and management as well. The unions have asked for a 7.5 per cent increase, which has been rejected by colleges, prompting a strike ballot of union members. Employers, meanwhile, have indicated that a settlement could be achieved at a 3.5 per cent increase, pending additional government funding to finance this.