When is a bank holiday not a bank holiday? When it’s in a college, it seems.

If you are in that dwindling band of FE employees who teaches for a living, you’ll be aware that your hours in class are calculated on a yearly basis: 828 for a 23 hour teaching week, 864 for 24 and so on. You’ll also have noticed that the trend in recent years has been to push these hours inexorably upwards.

Now the employers have come up with a new twist. If you teach on Mondays, you’ve got to have all those bank holiday hours you don’t spend in class, added back on to your total. In other words, you’ve got to teach them on another day.

Clearly we made a mistake in voting in Sally Hunt as the new Universities and Colleges Union general secretary. We should have gone for Bob Crow instead!