Sessional Staff
There are around 850 teaching staff at City College Brighton and Hove, 500 of whom are sessional. Nationally, these staff are the most vulnerable at FE colleges in terms of their pay and conditions. This is also the case here.
In brief:
After a year teaching sessionally at the College you have what's called 'continuity of service'. This means that you have similar rights to permanent staff in terms of a requirement for the College to continue to offer you the hours and pay you have been receiving, or redundancy.
After 4 years, you automatically become permanent. This is a legal requirement. The contracts given to staff in this position at City College are 'zero-hour' contracts, which means that they are permanent but do not guarantee a number of hours. However, despite this, your rights in law are unaffected: you are still entitled to the regular hours you have been working unless you are made redundant or have negotiated a change in hours with the College.
What does this mean for you if you are sessional? Well, in most respects it means that there must be equality and parity of pay and conditions between sessional and non-sessional staff. The College does calculate sessional pay based on the same scales and salaries as non-sessional staff (reduced to reflect the fact that sessional staff only work term-time). However, as union reps we see many cases where sessional staff are not treated equally. For example, it is illegal for sessional staff to lose hours so that non-sessional staff can have their timetables filled up.
We need to make changes for sessional staff at City College. This can be done in a variety of ways: negotiation for improved contracts; de-casualisation; raising awareness of sessional staff's minimum legal rights so that team leaders and line managers stay within the law; a 'sessional rights' charter; all of the above. The numbers of sessional staff who have joined the union in the last couple of years has vastly increased, meaning that we are in a much stronger position to negotiate and campaign collectively rather than simply fight the issues on a case-by-case basis.
This is a complex area but there is a simple way to get your head around your rights as a sessional lecturer. If you unsure whether you have been treated fairly, ask yourself this: 'Would this have happened to me if I were not sessional?'. If the answer is no, contact us. Similarly, if you want to switch from being sessional to non-sessional (can be a fractional, part-time post), please contact us. If you are losing pay because a course has been stopped a week early, contact us.
If it wouldn't happen to a non-sessional member of staff, it shouldn't happen to you!
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