- Conference
- 2026 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 6 October 2025
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes:
1)Higher Education in our society plays a significant role. Grand places of learning, created and developed over centuries, are now combined with more modern creations, uniting world-class teaching and research with industrial innovation and vocational education;
2)The histories of all four nations can’t be separated from the evolution of universities, students’ unions and associated organisations, and this makes the current situation more complicated than it needs to be;
3)More recently, the deliberate expansion of higher education under the Blair and Brown era allowed institutions to grow. A further increase in funding linked to the rise in tuition fees to £3,000 and then £9,000 led to significant investment and virtually all universities actively sought out recruitment of international students to boost university income;
4)More recently, government austerity and reluctance to raise fees and funding in real terms during a period of high inflation, has led to an economic crisis across the sector, but this is, as you’d expect, variable depending on the unique features of each institution;
5)This means the sector can still develop ground-breaking, world-leading research and produce thousands of highly educated individuals from across the planet, at the same time as trying to force through mass redundancies, closing buildings and courses;
6)The fact that universities and associated students’ unions are autonomous institutions means that there is little joined-up thinking or planning, with the encouraged element of competition for students (and therefore funding) creating unnecessary duplication and wasted resources. Referring to other universities as “competitors” is becoming normalised;
7)However, the sector makes a colossal contribution to the economy, providing research and development for industry, educating the future workforce and bringing in university income and expenditure across the UK generated by international students;
8)The expansion of higher education has dispensed with the idea that university is just for the upper and middle classes, with significant progress made on encouraging young people from diverse backgrounds to apply, but this progress is under threat from a combination of scarce resources and reactionary political ideas, which see generations of the wrong type of people being educated to degree level as a problem;
9)Trade unions across the sector also have a complicated history, with five unions now representing workers, and different unwritten rules about which unions organise which sections of workers in each institution. The tendency for the media to lazily assume that UCU is the only trade union is frustrating, but something we need to work on. It is understandable that students see their lecturers as the primary members of staff, when UNISON members will know that cleaners, porters, librarians, technicians etc. are crucial in the functioning of any higher education institution.
Conference believes:
a)Higher education has a crucial and continuing role to play in society, as well as potentially providing meaningful and fulfilling jobs for thousands of workers. However, this is increasingly under threat with continued austerity. Job “losses” are now being combined with significant pay cuts across the sector as Vice Chancellors and Principals determine that proving to be a going concern into the uncertain future is more important than staff rewards and wellbeing;
b)UNISON has and will continue to push back on threats to our members’ jobs and pensions, whilst at the same time, arguing for meaningful pay settlements and for the sector to be funded properly through general taxation;
c)There’s an immediate need to bailout most universities from the effects of austerity, and UNISON can and should continue to push for this. We’ve pointed out elsewhere that the money is there is the political will finds it, and/or raises it from squeezing the super-rich;
d)We should also remind ourselves of past motions passed at this conference:
“Universities should be properly nationalised, with genuine democratic control of how they’re run, by staff, students and the wider community. We can retain academic traditions, if we want to, but we don’t need unelected Vice-Chancellors and Principals on six-figure salaries and we don’t need the waste and bureaucracy of universities fighting each other for students and duplicated research. Universities can and should celebrate the reality that students from across the world want to study in the UK, and that diversity and a shared experience should be the driving force of international study, rather than the economic benefit. All public services should be provided free of charge to those who could benefit from them, and higher education should be no exception to this principle.”;
e)We urgently need to argue for universities to be modernised and brought into a joined-up system of control, so that workers can play a genuine role in decision making in the public service in which we all work.
Conference calls on the Higher Education Service Group Executive to:
i)Make the case for an urgent and significant injection of government funds to prevent the further deterioration of the sector and allow for pay justice for the workforce;
ii)Prepare and produce material to allow UNISON members in Higher Education to make our presence felt, both within UNISON and wider society. We need to carefully but forcefully explain the vital role all our members play within the education systems across all nations;
iii)Use all means available to campaign and lobby for a fully funded higher education system for the 21st century, which retains traditions where necessary, but allows sector wide democratic planning and cooperation to deliver for all society.