- Conference
- 2025 Local Government Service Group Conference
- Date
- 18 February 2025
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference knows that poor behaviour in colleges leads to staff experiencing stress, mental health problems, physical injuries and high staff turnover. It is the time for us to focus our efforts on tackling learner behaviour in the college sector as lower-paid support staff across the UK must no longer bear the brunt of abuse and violence that would not be tolerated on the streets.
Further education colleges serve a relatively high number of learners who need more support than they are getting, including learners with special needs learners from low-income communities and learners who have had negative past experiences with education. Fourteen years of underfunding have left further education colleges, sixth form colleges and the prison education service struggling to provide the education and opportunities people deserve and need.
UNISON has carried out two surveys, one in 2019 and one in 2024 on knife crime and drug use in colleges. We found that violence, crime and substance misuse are now widespread across colleges, with some learners regularly carrying weapons and drugs or arriving intoxicated. UNISON members described routinely finding drugs and weapons and injuries reported included a member of staff being stabbed in the back with a screwdriver and a student suffering multiple fractures and concussion, as well as bruising all over their body. More than seven in ten (73%) said they had no training on how to deal with students who bring weapons or drugs into college. As a result, more than half (53%) thought incidents were not resolved appropriately. More than a quarter (26%) of respondents said they don’t feel physically safe at work, and with pressure from College management to not report incidents this will only increase.
Conference will be aware that as well as these extreme incidents, daily low-level poor behaviour and verbal abuse exists in colleges and also needs to be addressed urgently.
We need to see more training and better security to reduce violence and substance abuse in colleges. We also need stricter consequences for learners breaking college rules and increased staffing levels to deal with the problems.
Conference therefore calls on the Service Group Executive to
1) Conduct a survey into low-level behaviour problems in colleges;
2) Investigate the experiences of our members who work in the prison education service;
3) Develop and run a national campaign on raising awareness of behaviour issues in the whole FE sector; FE, 6th forms and prison education;
4) Produce an organising strategy and information materials for regional use;
5) Work with press to raise the issue to the wider public.
