February 2002

Report of the January National Council Meeting

ACM’s National Council met in Birmingham at the end of January. The main items for discussion were a review of membership categories and a restructuring of the composition of the National Council. In order to reflect the changes in management structures within colleges it was decided to recommend the abolition of the existing membership categories to be replaced by only two – Principals and Managers. It is proposed that the number of elected positions on Council be reduced by six to thirty and Council will be composed as follows:

Principals - six places
Managers - fifteen places
Officers - six places (President, President Elect, Immediate Past President, Honorary Treasurer, General Secretary) from any category
UK Reps - three places (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) from any category

In addition, Council will be able to co-opt another six members onto Council in order to ensure that under-represented groups are adequately involved. The changes should make the National Council more representative of the membership whilst retaining its current strength as a highly influential organisation at national level. The changes will be considered at the Annual General Meeting, which is scheduled to take place during the Annual Conference in March.

Council considered a number of other issues, including national pay negotiations and CPI, the leadership and management college proposals, the Sweeney Task Group, the Education Green Paper, examination board problems and lobbying on funding and CSR.

Leadership & Management College

The DfES has launched a consultation ahead of the establishment of a college to provide professional training and development for managers working in the learning and skills sector. The introduction to the consultation document describes it as unacceptable that there is no strategic framework for the delivery of professional training, support and development. The goal of the college, as part of the wider Raising Standards agenda, is that every professional should have access to high quality training and development. The consultation is accompanied by a questionnaire, which invites views on a number of issues, including: -

• The college’s scope, the range of modules it should offer, the mode of training delivery

• A proposed new qualification for Principals

• Whether the college should include programmes designed for work-based learning providers, centres of adult and community learning and providers in the voluntary sector.

The consultation document states that the post 16 education and training sectors will increasingly be at the heart of the Government’s Lifelong Learning agenda. Raising the prestige and status of the sector is central to this. Those who lead and manage should have access to excellent training and development as a right, in order to deliver a high quality service to all learners. The aim is to establish a new college that will develop programmes that leaders and managers across the learning and skills and higher education sectors might take advantage of. DfES expect the first programmes for senior managers to be available from April 2003.

The Association is represented on the DfES Leadership and Management Advisory Group and its sub-committees. The Association had already intervened in order to ensure that the remit of the college includes all managers and to suggest that the creation of the college should be used as an opportunity to address equality issues at senior levels with colleges.
The deadline for responses is 1st May 2002. Please email your views to peterpendle@acm.uk.com by the beginning of April if you wish your ideas to inform the Association’s response.

Comprehensive Spending Review Submission

ACM has joined together with the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the other NJF unions to submit a detailed bid to the Secretary of State for Education, Estelle Morris, as part of the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review. The key demand is that pay levels and career opportunities in the sector have to be modernised in order to retain good staff and attract fresh talent. This will require a commitment to: -

• A new career structure for full-time college lecturers, broadly comparable in scales and allowances to those in place for school-teachers - at a cost by 2005-06 of some £93m pa above that already allowed for in the Teaching Pay Initiative (TPI) in 2003-04

• Comparable pay and conditions for part-time lecturers to meet equal pay requirements - at a cost of £150m by 2005-06

• A restructured college pay initiative programme for business support staff and managers equivalent to the TPI to provide similar improvements to pay levels - at a cost of £55m pa by 2005-06

• Support for colleges to bring their pay structures into line with national recommendations - at a cost of £122m pa from 2003-04 onwards

• Increases in employer pension scheme contributions - £14m pa from 2002-03 for the teachers pension scheme alone

• For these resources to be consolidated into mainstream college funding.