Unity between students and workers means a lot more than turning up on demonstrations or picket-lines when teaching staff go on strike. But that’s a useful starting point, and if I’m being honest then the student turnout for NATFHE’s rally outside the Association of Colleges conference in Birmingham (part of NATFHE’s national strike for the implementation of a pay deal they had struck to win last year) was disappointing. However, I know there are plenty of people around working to turn NUS into an organisation that takes labour movement solidarity seriously and mobilises properly for events like this (a couple of such people are working for West Midlands Area NUS at the moment so it was good to see them there).

The rally itself was well-attended (albeit not by students), with a couple of hundred lecturers turning out. Call me a crazy Trot if you like, but attending a rally alongside hundreds of striking workers is, on every conceivable level, better than spending six hours in an NEC meeting that contrives to invent new and exciting way to avoid the discussion of them motions.

After marching with the strikers outside the AOC conference, myself and some of the other student activists on the demonstration were whisked away to attend one of the workshops taking place inside the conference itself. It ran somewhat contrary to my better instincts to leave a trade union rally and attend the conference of the very bosses against whom the workers were striking, but I figured that the opportunity to go into the belly of the beast and make a nuisance of myself was too good to pass up.

Unfortunately, the workshop I was in (it was all about “self-assessment”) was only an hour long, and that hour seemed to disappear almost instantaneously in a hail of petulant whining from FE college principals about this or that complication with this or that system of self-assessment. I didn’t get too much of a chance to irritate them (prominently displaying copies of NATFHE’s “Why we are striking” leaflet was about the best I could do), but listening to them all hold forth was certainly an enlightening experience.

If anyone doesn’t know, let me put in a quick word about what the Association of Colleges is. It is, in short, the association – the union, if you will – for bosses and employers in the Further Education sector. Just as workers in the workplace and students on campus form unions to collectively fight for our interests, so bosses form unions – or “associations” – to fight for theirs. And being in this workshop was an excellent reminder that the interests of bosses and the interests of workers and students in the education sector are irreconcilable.

The people in that room were the type of people who collect seats on the committees of local councils and refer to students as “customers”. (I’m not making that up – someone actually did that during the workshop.) They want “focus groups”, and they want to borrow methods of self-assessment from business so they can “benchmark the performance of [their] college against insurance companies, steel-makers and other corporations.” (Again, I’m not making any of this up; everything in quotation marks is a real quote.) They proudly announced that they “have people from business on [their] governing bodies”, and expressed a desire to develop a “share language with employers.” In short, they want to run their colleges like the Chief Executive runs a firm, and they don’t want to educate students – they want to train us to be workplace fodder.

There has been much talk of the recently published review of Further Education by Sir Andrew Foster, so I’ll devote some time to that here. It talks blandly about putting “the learner voice” at the heart of Further Education without ever really concretising what that means – for us in NUS, it means students’ unions, but the people I sat with would prefer to interpret it to mean focus groups or other tokenistic nods towards student representation.

The NUS needs to make it clear that it’s our – i.e. students’ – conception of “the learner voice” that should be applied, and the practical implication of implementing Foster’s recommendations is that FE college managements should massively increase the pitifully low levels of funding they currently afford to students’ unions in their institutions.

Unfortunately, Foster’s review also concedes a significant role for business and employers in FE, and to principals who want to develop a “shared language with employers” and who speak fondly of their “partners in industry”, this must sound like sweet music. But it’s a notion NUS must reject. We should robustly oppose any role for private business in the shaping of curricula or the allocation of funding. We should oppose all private investment in FE unless the funds are democratically controlled and allocated, and the investor has absolutely no say as to how the funds are spent (and the very nature of private investment means that this is pretty much inherently impossible). We need to argue for a living EMA for all FE students so they don’t have to rely on the benevolence of business to get by – either directly through their course or by being forced to use their time outside of college to work. We should link up with the labour movement to make sure that FE students who work are aware of their rights and have access to a strong trade union. I don’t think that we currently do any of things as vocally or in as belligerent a manner as we should.

I began to drift out of the workshop when the discussion became bogged down in assessing the relative merits of “KPI”, “the RAG rating”, and “the business excellence model”. (All different methods of self-assessment, apparently.) The exact method by which the bosses assess their own effectiveness as bosses (which is what, in this context, “self-assessment” comes down to) is not a particular concern of mine.

Attending the workshop certainly help reinforce my beliefs about FE and what the NUS should say about it We need to be arguing for the radical reorganisation of the sector; a reorganisation that takes control out of the hands of corporate suits (who see students either as “customers” or as mere low-paid workers-in-training to be delivered, fully formed, to their “partners in industry”) and places it in the hands of students and workers in the sector.

It’s time we stopped letting the other side set the terms of the debate here. Instead of just trying to cherry pick the bits we can use to our advantage from reviews conducted by government bureaucrats, we should go on the attack about how we want Further Education to be funded and organised.

The National Union of Students often lobbies the AOC (and Universities UK, its equivalent in the HE sector) and even maintains something a working relationship on some issues. But maybe it’s time we realised that there’s a line in the sand between the AOC and, for example, workers in the FE sector who provide an absolutely essential service to our members and get treated like dirt by their employers and their club – the AOC.

I’m sure that most NUS officers would agree with my belief that the NUS and our members are on the same side as the striking workers, and not that of the bosses in their plush conference centre built with money from the arms trade. * So let’s start acting like it.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

* The clocks in the Birmingham International Convention Centre are all sponsored by IMI, a major arms manufacturer.

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