Pay and Working Conditions: Further Education
National Contract for Further Education
These are some of the advantages of the National Contract:
- it provides protection against an individual college, intent on cost cutting, from worsening your conditions of service
- by 1 September 2016 all employees will be on the National Contract
- it will provide a contractual right to a national pay scale
- it will prohibit zero hours contracts
- it will provide all direct employees with the living wage backdated to 1 August 2013
Relevant documentation:
- Summary of main conditions of service in the National Contract (pdf)
- The Lecturers’ Workload Agreement (pdf): this agreement sets out the detail about lecturers’ hours and workload
- The Implementation Agreement (pdf): this document describes how and when the National Contract will be implemented; Colleges will have the right to decide when to implement the contract between 1 January 2014 and 31 August 2016; you will have the right, if you so wish, to remain on your existing contract up until 31 August 2016
- The National Contract: there are several different versions of the contract (A-J), depending on your staff category (management/lecturer/business support) and your pattern of work (e.g. full-time/part-time/hourly-paid); most of the provisions are identical in each version, however there are some difference, for example regarding holiday entitlement; only one version will be relevant to any individual.