Good Evening,
I want to start by thanking you for the opportunity to speak to you today. It is on issues like this that it is important that there is solidarity between students and staff in institutions. When we look at securing both staff and students rights we have to continue to stand side-by-side supporting each other and working together.

I am here today to add my voice to your campaign. My voice and the voice of my members. There are four million learners that I represent out there today in colleges across the country, and they stand with you. At the National Union of Students we recognise that in order for students and learners to have the best possible education, they need to have the best possible conditions. In creating those conditions, management of our colleges need to ensure they motivate the hard working staff who deliver day to day for students.

Motivated staff means well-paid staff. Staff who feel that their status as professionals grants them equality and equity with the rest of the education sector. I for one am tired of hearing how important our sector is to ‘up-skilling the UK knowledge economy’, when its our sector that sees the lowest paid professionals of all of the UK’s education sectors.

I don’t need to tell you that UCU members in the FE sector are paid less than those teaching similar qualifications in sixth-form colleges. I don’t need to tell you that UCU members in the FE sector are paid less that their HE counterparts. I don’t need to tell you, because you live that reality, that in-equality, every day of your working lives.

It needs to stop.

I stand here with you today because I support your demands for equality. Only when we the see that the staff in our sector are paid fair wages can we start to conceive a world in which the real value of further education is recognised in our society.

We see increasingly higher demands being placed in the hands of staff working in the FE sector – but yet still those in the sector continue to be treated like second class citizens. It is often said that further education is “policy busy”, well I think we all know who this busyness really impacts on, it’s the teaching and support staff who have to make these government directives work, in the classroom and beyond.

This is not a new phenomenon, but the situation is getting worse. When college income has increased substantially over the last ten years it is disgraceful that in real terms the amounts given to our staff is cut back year on year. The fact that colleges spend proportionally less on staff here in 2008 than they did in 1998 is unacceptable.

Put that in the context of the increases that Principals have enjoyed and its like adding insult to injury. Is it not slightly hypocritical to claim institutional poverty, and insist you cannot afford a fair deal for staff, when we know that there has been more than a fair deal for college management? Call me cynical if you will, but when I hear that Principals have enjoyed pay rises up to fifty percent higher than teaching staff, I think I can work out when the extra funding is going – and its not into your back pocket. We are seeing senior management bulge in every sense of the word.

That is why I stand here today and support your campaign. I will spread the word amongst my members, but I encourage you to do the same. Don’t let college management try to use students against you in this fight, talk to students, explain the realities of the situation, highlight to them the real inequality of this system, and in doing so between us we can ensure that the message to college management is clear.

In recent years NUS has been working proactively with the TUC and many unions including UCU to build links between students’ unions and trade unions in colleges. I urge you to go out there and make these relationships happen. Invite your student president to your joint trade union committee meetings, encourage your activists to get involved in students’ union campaigns and build a strong and lasting relationship because when staff and students campaign together college managers have no-one to divide and rule.

Students demand motivated staff to help them learn, and students know that motivated staff means fair pay for staff, equality for staff and an end to real term staff salary cuts in our sector.

I look forward to working with you as this campaign develops. From me and my four million members – “In Unity.”

Thank You.