UCU officers spent Friday afternoon meeting with CCCG senior management, making the case for slowing down the return to face-to-face teaching. Management refused to consider a return after Easter, arguing that they were constrained by government guidelines. 

UCU reps have spent many hours in meetings this week and raised numerous, detailed points relating to safety. Last Thursday’s cross-college cross-union meeting revealed the scale of fear and anger that members are feeling. 

WHAT’S THE RUSH?  

Government guidelines give room for us to make sure that the process of returning is safe and well-organised. 

We are extremely disappointed to have to report that there has been no movement to delay arrangements for those courses scheduled to return on the 8th. What was presented as a “proposal” has not been changed.  In many instances, important details as to how the return will be organised have not been provided so that there are still real concerns about the safety of the 16-18 courses. 

That said, there has been more flexibility in other areas, mainly for Adult provision. We will continue to lobby for safe procedures and delayed starts. Please let your local rep know your concerns. 

Personal Risk Assessments and a safe return to work

What we want

As previously reported, your union reps have been arguing for HR to make a commitment to protect the following groups of staff by allowing them to continue to work remotely until such time as their first vaccination has taken effect:

·       aged 60 or over

·       with a condition that puts you at higher risk (clinically vulnerable)

·       main carers for someone at high risk from coronavirus

Plus, additional consideration for those aged 50+ and people who share a household or caring responsibility with clinically vulnerable people.

Why would a caring employer put their staff at unnecessary risk when a much safer situation (ie post 1^st vaccine) is in clear sight?  By the time we get to after the Easter break then most of these groups will have already had their first jab and, IF Johnson’s road map goes to plan, then our reduced ‘world’ will be a slightly safer place.

NB:  If you fall into one of the above groups, you may use the link below to get a vaccine appointment.  This can be an alternative to waiting for the notification from your GP.  It is possible that this link might not automatically work for some clinically vulnerable people, but we are reliably informed that this link is also working NOW for the next vaccination group – ie those aged 55+. Book a coronavirus vaccination

What HR say

HR have said they will NOT be taking a ‘blanket approach’.  Anyone who has any concerns should raise them with their Line Manager.  If appropriate mitigation arrangements cannot be agreed with LM then these concerns will be passed up to the local HR Business Partner (for WKC, this is Ollia Alexis).

What happens next

We urge you to complete the new Risk Assessment form.  Log all your concerns on the form (in the Discussions box).  Complete again and resubmit the form if your concerns have ‘changed’.

Ask (on the form) to be allowed to remain working from home until your first vaccine takes effect – or whatever your own conditions for return to work might be.

Do not agree to anything you don’t want to agree with.

We also advise members to consider doing an online risk assessment if they have reason to believe:

1. Their rooms or work patterns have been changed since they last completed a risk assessment
2. Their personal circumstances have changed (and also including for example circumstances of partners or other family members who are shielding. Remember that the list of those shielding has been increased).  
3. They have been asked to come in when they are not required for face-to-face interactions. 

If you complete a risk assessment, you should not return to the building until your manager has responded to it. If there is disagreement, you should contact HR and your local UCU rep.

 Those who are CEV are not required to return before 29 March at the earliest.

Please sign this petition and circulate to colleagues in your departments.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/support-not-monitoring-no-to-ofsted-visit-cccg

Support not monitoring: No to OFSTED visit.

Staff at Capital City College Group (CCCG) are shocked and appalled at the announcement of an Ofsted monitoring visit.

Teaching staff across CCCG have moved mountains to ensure that our students continue to receive the education they deserve.  At a time when many are looking after their children through home schooling and taking care of sick members of their families, staff are doing all they can to meet the needs of their students.

Despite putting their physical and mental health at risk they have continued to go the extra mile to help their students reach their goals.

Ofsted must realise the anxiety and stress that ​their visits have on all staff in the sector in normal times. To announce an inspection in the midst of a pandemic that has so far claimed over 120,000 lives demonstrates either how out of touch Ofsted has become or​ that the organisation does not care about the wellbeing of staff and students.

The educational value of such a visit is very dubious. The idea that an inspection, whilst all teaching has moved online, can measure the development of teaching and learning at the college since the last inspection, made when full face-to-face teaching was taking place, will hold no credibility.

This visit, rather than help our struggling students and communities, ​will only serve to deepen the cynicism of those working within the sector towards Ofsted.  

There are many other ways for Ofsted to provide support and advice in the middle of a public health crisis rather than through a miss-timed inspection to crudely measure the progress of a college.

We call upon Ofsted to pause all inspections until we are back in September 2021.

To sign the petition, click here. 

Have you signed our WKC UCU petition about the restructure? It’s vital that we make sure we are not overwhelmed by extra work as so many managers have left, and make sure that proper processes are followed in the future.

If you are a member and haven’t signed yet, here is the link to the petition – http://chng.it/QK2jVHhQRb

We are deeply concerned by the management restructure at WKC. We do not believe the process has been fair and transparent. We are concerned that a whole raft of management posts remains unfilled whilst we have lost many experienced managers. This is all happening against the backdrop of the deepest health, social and educational crisis – we need stability and support. 

We therefore call upon the Principal and Vice-Principal to take the following immediate actions:  

1. Inform staff of the names of all managers who’ve left, and those whose departures are pending, after taking VR because of the reorganisation
2. Publish financial cost of reorganisation (including costs of VR and recruiting agency staff as interims etc) 
3. Outline timetable and process for recruitment of new permanent managers (22 posts to be filled) 
4. Explain processes/justifications for recruitment of interim managers (some prior to and some after the selection stage of the restructuring)
5. Provide Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) that includes: 
   (a) risks of potential discrimination identified at the outset of the management reorganisation process 
   (b) steps taken to mitigate those risks and their impact on the process i.e. any changes made
6. Meet with staff affected by the shortage of managers and grant remission hours to compensate for the additional workload and responsibilities generated in areas with unfilled management posts.

Flexibility and safety to ensure student learning and staff well-being.

Whilst the news of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine availability is welcome the short to medium term prospects are still ones in which many people will contract the virus and die unless strict safety plans are implemented. 

It is shocking that the death rate has reached over 75,000 and contagion rates continue​ to surpass those reached in March/April last year.  0ne in thirty people in London have contracted the virus. Thousands have died unnecessarily due to the government’s refusal to listen to the advice of scientists and education unions but instead put the needs of profit before people’s lives. 

The government’s latest last-minute announcement to implement a third national lockdown and to include schools and colleges has once again led to confusion and despair amongst all those who work in the sector. 

If they had followed the science and union advice, we would be in a much better position to control the spread of the virus and therefore ensure that there would be a lot less disruption to face-to-face teaching. 

We would all prefer to be back in the classroom, but it’s not about what we prefer it is about what is safe. 

We hope everyone within the leadership team recognises that we can’t rely on government to make the right choices when it comes to staff, students’ and our community’s safety.  

We have to take control and act now to protect lives. 

As workers in the education sector our priority is to make available the best possible education for our students in these challenging times. We cannot simply attempt to adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach to teaching and learning and the running of the college in general. This would create significant barriers to learning for many students.  

We must be able to work flexibly to achieve this aim. Remote working increases workload. We welcome the CEO’s announcement that we are now returning to the ‘willing and able’ approach adopted in the March lockdown and trust that all managers adhere to this approach. 

The cancelling of all exams was the right decision. But again, the government, by leaving this decision so late in the academic year, has made it more difficult for staff to put in place the appropriate procedures and teaching resources. 

The government’s new slogan of, ‘Trust the teachers not an algorithm’ is correct. But there must be a transparent assessment method that ALL students feel confident will not discriminate against them. 

This must also apply at group level too. Last year the centre assessed grade model the group adopted changed up to 30% of teacher’s grades. The majority of which were downgrades.  Very few teachers were even consulted about these grade changes. 

This can never happen again. We want a transparent and fair assessment system that trusts the teacher and not the algorithm. 

There should be no rush back to face-to-face teaching. We must see a continuous decline in infection rates over a significant period before we return to onsite teaching. 

If we feel that government or management are making decisions that puts in jeopardy the safety of our students, staff and community we will not hesitate to use our collective strength to ensure their safety is protected.  

All unions (NEU, UNISON and UCU) across the CCCG are holding a joint meeting on Thursday 7 January at 5.00 pm. Please make every effort to join the online Zoom meeting to discuss very important issues such as online teaching expectations, exam arrangements and health and safety concerns. A link to this meeting has been emailed to members’ college email account.

Tuesday 5 January, 5.30pm

Speakers include UCU Gen Sec Jo Grady, NEU VP Daniel Kebede, ISAGE and others 

·         Zoom registration

This is an emergency meeting for Further Education members to discuss and shape our response to the latest developments of the Covid-19 national emergency and safety for our colleges and our communities.

The following notice was submitted to the CCCG CEO on Weds 18 November 2020 by Adam Lincoln, London Regional Official, UCU

Capital City College Group – Notice of Failure to Agree

UCU hereby give notice of a ‘Failure to Agree’ on the following issue, having been unable to reach agreement with Group management on a set of proposals for safer working conditions as requested in the email to you from local UCU representatives dated 6th November 2020.

The failure of Capital City College Group management to implement the following proposals in full:

· cease all plans to reduce the number of lessons that are taught online.

· move all 16-18-year olds lessons up to at least 50% online.

· initiate discussions with Adult Education Teams to increase online teaching.

· allow all staff in vulnerable categories, and all staff who live with a person in a vulnerable category, to teach online with full pay (including all staff who are 60 years or over).

· reopen the Marlborough and the Regents Park sites for teaching and other purposes to allow additional social distancing measures to be put in place.

If we do not receive an explicit confirmation that the Group management agree and will implement these proposals in full no later than close of business Friday 20th November 2020, UCU will have no choice but to consider ourselves to be in dispute with the college.

The way that this issue can be resolved is via agreement to implement these proposals in full via a collective agreement.

We look forward to discussing the issue further with the Group management.

************

The following additional letter was also submitted to the CCCG CEO on Weds 18 November 2020 by Adam Lincoln, London Regional Official, UCU.

Capital City College Group – additional serious concerns

Further to the Failure to Agree letter sent earlier today concerning Covid-19 Health & Safety matters, I am writing now to raise a number of additional serious concerns that UCU are seeking to address and resolve with CCCG management.  I outline these issues below.

Workload

In order to address excessive workloads and halt overbearing micromanagement, UCU calls on the college to:

· End all observations, themed visits and learning walks until the college is running in normal conditions, and to scrap the grading of the ones that have taken place.

· To invest in staff resources, for example to immediately employ departmental administrators whose main purpose will be to follow-up student attendance, in order to relieve current excessive workload pressures.

· UCU calls upon the GLT to implement remission hours for course management.

· To set up a staff/union/management working group to look at monitoring staff workloads and reducing unreasonable expectations thereof.

Management operation

· UCU calls upon the governing board to review the management restructures and their impact on workload and efficiency.

· UCU calls for an inquiry into the systemic problems concerning enrolment, timetabling and IT systems.

· UCU calls upon HR to agree to respond to Union officers’ emails within five working days (in line with college policy) and to review its procedures.

Pay and HPL and LSAs

· That the 19/20 and 20/21 pay claim and the harmonisation of pay across the group (to ensure all staff are on London weighting) is resolved.

· That the CIC HPL contract be harmonised across the group.

· LSAs to be allowed to continue to be eligible for the group 3-year fractionalisation policy as was agreed when original agreement was made.

Harmonisation and restructures.

The current Harmonisation programme is being pursed at an unsustainable and unacceptable pace. UCU calls for a temporary halt to all restructures and the harmonisation programme, UCU will engage with the process of policy harmonisation, starting with agreement on the number to be addressed over a reasonable time frame, once meaningful progress has been made with the issues outlined above.

The above are all issues on which UCU has been seeking progress but on which there has been no significant movement to date.  UCU remains willing to seek negotiated agreement on these matters, and we hope that you will intervene to ensure that CCCG senior managers engage with UCU to achieve progress and agreement.

In the absence of meaningful progress on these issues UCU will be left with little option than to escalate matters through our agreed formal procedures. I look forward to hearing from you soon and hope that we can agree a means of progressing the matters above to agreement. For the avoidance of doubt, UCU requires confirmation no later than close of business Friday 20th November that CCCG management is willing to resolve the above issues with a view to reaching agreement.

UCU, NEU and Unison across the Group have started a petition, which members are strongly urged to sign by Fiday, in support of our efforts to ensure safe working at this time. The link is here:

http://chng.it/Ns5sGwWgt6

As front-line workers, we should not be expected to risk our lives to teach. UCU and the NEU have called on the government to include schools, colleges and universities in the lockdown and move to a remote model of teaching and learning, for all but essential provision.   As the DFE has noted, ‘A significant risk associated with FE is the potential to facilitate wider transmission between households and workplace settings, by providing greater connectivity within a community.’  If the education sector is not moved online, the lockdown will be less effective and may need to last longer. Government guidance currently states that “universities and adult education settings should consider moving to increased levels of online learning where possible”.   

We therefore call upon management

• to allow all staff in vulnerable categories and all staff who live with a person in a vulnerable category to be able to teach online immediately,  with full pay 
• to reopen Regents Park Centre to create more space and therefore a safer environment as Covid-19 cases rise

We resolve  

• to declare a dispute with management with the intent of escalating to industrial action if there is any attempt to increase the amount of face-to-face teaching currently taking place within each curriculum area of the college. 
• at a minimum, to remain with the blended learning proportions that each area is currently using. There should be no increase in face-to-face provision while we are in the midst of this pandemic. 

The CEO is scheduled to address staff this Wednesday afternoon. There will be a WKC UCU Joint Branch meeting on Thursday at 1.00 to discuss our response to what  he puts forward:

WKC UCU is inviting all members across the college to the meeting, which will be held online via Zoom. A link to the meeting has been sent out by email to your college email address. If you have not received an invite please notify your branch secretary.