Glyn Matthews reports:

The Welsh Assembly plans to reorganise the way in which the funding of the Welsh assembly grant (WAG) is to be administered. The proposal is that from 2010 the top-up grant for fees will be scrapped and instead the WAG will simply constitute a larger maintenance grant. On the surface, this simply sounds like a bureaucratic and unnecessary change to the system without any damaging effects. If we analyse the proposals in more detail it is quite clearly an attack on education.

Currently only a thirdof students in Wales are eligible to the maintenance grant but many more are eligible for the top-up fees grant. When this is gone they will not receive any part of the WAG as the are not changing the eligibility of the maintenance grant, leaving many students having to take out larger and larger loans to cover the cost of their loans.
The other side of this is those students who will lose the fees grant but will receive a higher maintenance grant. Once again on the surface this sounds fine. However, Jane Hutt the Welsh education minister said:
“much of the £61m used currently to fund the tuition fee grants should be added to Assembly Learning Grants. These are means-tested grants available to help pay for students’ living costs.”

This shows clearly two things, firstly this will mean a further extension of means testing in education which all socialists should oppose. Secondly without stating the amount of money involved is this new ‘scheme’ Jane Hutt does omit that not all £61m used now will then be used by using the word ‘much’ rather than ‘all’
Despite this, both the assembly government and Welsh universities have welcomed the proposal with all the Orwellian language they can muster by presenting this as an improvement. At this stage we can only speculate why, but clearly if the fees are not being paid for by the assembly any longer then it would open the door for Welsh universities to charge higher and higher top-up fees as this will no longer be a drain on the assembly budget. This clearly shows the need to take action now before it is too late!

The role of the NUS in all off this seems to be silence. There is absolutely no mention of this on the NUS website. Once again the NUS leadership has shown their inability to be a campaigning organisation leaving Socialist Students to take up issues without their backing.

Socialists demand

• A fighting campaign led by NUSWales to defeat these proposals.
• For an NUS organised demonstration in Cardiff with all Welsh universities students unions’ to provide transport to the demonstration.
• For the NUS nationally to back to campaign and extend the campaign to the rest of Britain by supporting the Campaign to defeat fees and the national demonstration on February 25th
  
  

Ronnie Job, UNISON steward, Gorseinon College (personal capacity)

Monday morning and the staff of our college gather to hear the Principal explain that management will be seeking to identify £800,000 of savings by the end of the academic year (July).
Meetings like this are taking place in colleges across Wales because the Plaid/Labour coalition in the Welsh Assembly has slashed funding to Further Education. The sector as a whole will see an absolute fall in its funding of 1% but this represents over 7.4% less than colleges had planned and budgeted for to meet the needs of increased student numbers.What is particularly frightening is that these cuts come when the monies the Assembly receives from Westminster have increased by 4.3% . What will happen the following year, after Gordon Brown cuts billions from public sector spending, including the allocation for the Assembly, in the budget?

Mood to fight developing
After the initial stunning effect a mood to fight is developing in the colleges. Neath/Port Talbot College trade unionists held a lunch time protest outside the grounds recently and separate meetings of UCU and UNISON have decided on organising together a similar action in our college for next Wednesday (25 March), when we understand that college gate rallies will also be taking place in Swansea College and Coleg Sir Gâr. These separate actions need to be linked into an all Wales campaign, including a mass lobby of the Assembly buildings in Cardiff and involving students and their families.

The underfunding of education by the Labour/Plaid politicians in Cardiff may be the immediate cause of this crisis but our members have absolutely no confidence in our own college management to either oppose these cuts or to protect our jobs and prevent compulsory redundancies. “What savings are coming from senior management?” is a question that has been asked several times today in meetings of UNISON and UCU members.

Principal won't oppose cuts
In a meeting with union reps, our Principal said that no college management can turn round to the assembly and say that they can’t make these cuts because the 22/23 colleges in Wales are separate corporations, each competing for a shrinking pool of students and a shrinking funding pot. So they go on making the cuts… and we lose our jobs and education suffers.

We need to commit our unions to opposing all compulsory redundancies because it is clear is that there is absolutely nothing left to cut after years of tightening. Every job lost from non teaching staff will result in a poorer service to students and will increase the administrative burden on teaching staff, while making teaching staff redundant means cutting provision, which will just be storing up problems for the future because it will result in reduced future funding.
No compulsory redundancies!

March 24:NUS Wales cave in on fees.
NUS Wales' Spring Conference has decided to dump its previous policy of formal opposition to top-up fees and instead welcome proposals from Welsh Assembly Education Minister, Jane Hutt, to remove the Assembly Learner’s Grant (which pays the top-up fee portion of tuition fees for all welsh-domiciled students) and replace it with a means tested bursary and enhanced grants.
Iain Dalton, Bangor University Socialist Students

This comes as no surprise to Socialist Students members, as the President of NUS Wales, Ben Gray, came up to Bangor to argue against the Campaign to Defeat Fees referendum that we had initiated here. NUS Wales now has the ludicrous position of being ‘principally’ opposed to top-up fees whilst rejecting the possibility that it can challenge them!
Whilst the NUS Wales leadership argues that it is being pragmatic and is helping to increase access for students from a poorer background, they ignore the fact that many students are put off by means testing and many don’t get their full entitlement. Furthermore, such a stand opens the door even more to the lifting of the cap on top-up fees, which even the highest grant of £5000 may not cover, and that’s before adding living costs to that!
The Welsh Assembly proposals have also created division within Plaid Cymru, as its Ministers in the One Wales coalition with Labour are in favour of introducing full top-up fees for Welsh-domiciled students. Plaid MP, Adam Price, has threatened trying to get a judicial review of the decision, whilst Cymru X (Plaid’s youth wing) are taking up a campaign to lobby AM’s to vote against the proposals. Socialist Students and Campaign to Defeat Fees activists in Wales are attempting to discuss with Cymru X about how we can campaign to stop the introduction of top-up fees for welsh-domiciled students and get rid of fees altogether.

Ronnie Job reports:
The Welsh Assembly has performed a partial u-turn on Further Education (FE) funding in Wales, coming up with an additional £8.93 million in an announcement on 15 April.
The extra money is entirely down to the campaign waged by UCU and UNISON over the 2 weeks leading up to the Easter holidays. In that time there have been high profile college gate protests in at least 3 colleges, with hundreds of staff and students taking part in each oneAssembly Members (AMs) have been inundated with visits to surgeries and letters from those working or studying in FE and there was a lobby of around 500 staff and students of the Welsh Assembly buildings. More than one AM has admitted to union stewards in my college that we have succeeded in making this the main topic of conversation at the Assembly during breaks in business. All of this has been backed up with the threat of industrial action in those colleges where redundancy notices have gone out.

Campaign from the bottom up!

This campaign has been entirely run by stewards and other workplace activists in UNISON and UCU who’ve come up with the ideas and have organised to make events a success. Credit also goes to students who’ve grasped the importance of fighting to defend their education and supported us every step of the way. Everyone involved will be celebrating a significant victory achieved in an incredibly short space of time. But I think there will be some unease that regional officers from both unions seem to have reached the conclusion that the campaign is now over when there have not yet been any guarantees from Management in the colleges that there will be no compulsory redundancies.
If there are still compulsory redundancies in any of the colleges then there will be fury that Management are proceeding to sack our members despite the extra funding, which they have done little or nothing to fight for. Unions in any college that makes redundancies must not be left to fight alone. Members across Wales need to be drawn into a further campaign to force more concessions from the Assembly and provide support and solidarity to any college where unions are forced into industrial action to defend jobs and the quality of the education we provide.

If we’ve now put a stop to compulsory redundancies caused by this financial settlement, potentially bigger battles loom as the employers attempt to carry through cuts to re-organise FE in Wales by merging colleges and the effect of a £500 million reduction in Assembly funding from Westminster bites. A 2-week campaign showed the potential for organisation and the initiative of union members in the colleges. We need to carry the confidence we’ve gained into these future battles and we need to raise the demand to reverse previous partial privatisation and end the status of colleges as independent corporations.

For properly funded Further Education, publically run and publically accountable!

The Welsh Assembly was forced into a partial u-turn on Further Education (FE) funding in Wales, coming up with an additional £8.93 million. This, as reported below, was entirely due to a high-profile campaign organised by stewards in UNISON and UCU. Unfortunately, having secured a partial victory, a part of the Wales leadership in both unions seems to consider the campaign is now over and any matters outstanding “a matter for local negotiation” in the words of one official.
But far from being new additional funds the £8.93 million, which is to be shared between FE colleges and local authorities, for school sixth forms, is simply the return of part of what was taken from the sector in the first place when over 7% was sliced off the funding allocations for 2009-10. The result in Gorseinon College has been the announcement that we have entered into a 30 day consultation period over compulsory redundancies on top of already agreed voluntary redundancies. We also face the potential loss of 1 outreach centre. Not only are colleagues threatened with the sack but the scope of adult and community learning in the area will be much reduced.

The fact that we don’t accept that the Welsh Assembly has given FE Colleges in Wales enough cash to continue with the same level of provision does not let our Management of the hook; we do not accept that they have no choice in finding these savings except sacking our members. Union members will be opposing Management over the sacking of our colleagues by any means necessary, up to and including strike action, and campaigning for the Assembly to return the rest of the funds stolen from FE.
The success of campaigning before Easter shows the potential and the initiative that exists amongst union members; campus stewards and union members, not just in Gorseinon, but in colleges across Wales should be proud of what we’ve achieved to date. We need to carry the confidence we’ve gained into the current campaign. We also need to raise the demand to reverse previous partial privatisation and end the status of colleges as independent corporations, returning them to local authority control.

For properly funded Further Education, publically run and publically accountable!