- Conference
- 2025 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 10 October 2024
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes that in many Higher Education Institutions professional support staff have significantly lower entitlement to annual leave than academic staff. This disparity is unfair and unjustifiable. Higher Education professional support staff across the country provide a vital service to our universities and students by carrying out hugely varied roles across our HEIs, too often our members are carrying heavy workloads and suffering from understaffing and delays to or freezes on recruitment into posts. Annual leave is key to ensuring staff can take a break from work and relax and has huge benefits for health and wellbeing.
Our members deserve parity with their academic colleagues. Some branches have made great progress locally in increasing annual leave entitlements for professional support staff and the campaign has been very popular with their membership. We are not seeking a national agreement on annual leave simply equity with our colleagues in our own institutions.
We need to build momentum in other branches and campaign for increased annual leave entitlement in all our Universities. UNISON branches should campaign to equalise annual leave for Professional Support staff with that of academics.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to;
1)produce national materials to support a campaign for equal annual leave,
2)develop a bargaining guide for branches to support this campaign.