For higher education, there’s multiple “ways in” when looking at the raft of employment rights changes that the new government is set to introduce.
Its Employment Rights Bill – the “the biggest upgrade to workers’ rights in a generation” – will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts, end fire and rehire, and introduce basic employment rights from day one – like paternity and parental leave, and protection from unfair dismissal.
It introduces the right to bereavement leave from day one, introduces a new statutory probation period for companies’ new hires, and strengthens statutory sick pay – removing the lower earnings limit for all workers and cutting out the waiting period before sick pay kicks in.
There’s also quite a bit of relaxation of trade union legislation that will make strike balloting easier, introduce electronic balloting, protect participants in industrial action and ensure employees know they can join a union.
As such there are all sorts of potential implications for university staff, both permanent and casual; implications for universities as employers (of both staff and students as staff); and implications for both universities and their SUs as employers.
It comes on top of the news earlier in the year that the Low Pay Commission’s remit and recommendation on minimum wage rates will now (for the first time) extend to looking at the costs that people face – broadly the methodology that the Living Wage Foundation’s “Real” Living Wage has been using for some time.
One thing is clear – taken as a whole, the costs of employment are likely to increase – and there’s little to no prospect that the government will recognise that explicitly in additional funding to universities or SUs.
Many of the mooted specifics on implications are also going to have to wait. Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s promise was a bill within 100 days – and she just squeaked over the line. But to get there there’s a whole raft of stuff that’s to be decided in secondary legislation, some new rights that won’t come into effect until autumn 2026, and some stuff still to come that’s not even mentioned in the Bill itself.
The mooted “right to switch off”? That may well not be a “right” at all – the government will ask employers to propose “a code of conduct”. And the promised ban on unpaid internships? That’s in the long grass (again) – and will be the subject of a special consultation all of its own.
University (and SU) staff
For career staff, many of the new minimums may well already be bettered in employment contracts, depending on role and provider. There are moderate improvements to the right to request flexible working, some extensions to paternity and bereavement leave, and a confusing duo of the removal of the two-year qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims.
There’s also (confusingly) the simultaneous creation of newly defined probationary periods with a “lighter” dismissal process for employees who are not a “good fit”.
Of some interest given the current financial pressures in the sector are new rules on collective redundancy that remove the limitation that previously required consultation and notification only when 20 or more redundancies were proposed at a single “establishment” – now the collective redundancy requirements will apply across an employer’s entire organisation. And the Bill pretty much shuts down loopholes that allow fire and rehire and fire and replace practices.
Promised commitments to progress paid travel time, menopause and wellbeing “guidance”, the extension of pay gap reporting to cover ethnicity and disability, and a consultation on workplace surveillance will all come later – as will a review of health and safety guidance and guidance on collective grievances.
Strikes will also be of considerable interest to HE all-round. As well confirming the scrapping of that daft Minimum Services Act that Gillian Keegan threatened HE with last year, the Bill will repeal requirements that at least 50 per cent of union members entitled to vote must participate in a ballot for it to be valid – only a simple majority of those who actually voted will now be needed. There will also be new protections from adverse consequences resulting from participating in protected industrial action.
Students at work
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t non-student HE staff that aren’t on zero-hours contracts – but the changes there are going to have a much more widespread impact both on students, and on universities and SUs and employers of students and deployers of such contracts.
There will be a right to a proper policy on tips in hospitality, a right to guaranteed hours, a right to proper notice of shifts and compensation if shifts are cancelled, and changes to statutory sick pay (which abolish the waiting period and minimum salary level) will also apply to those on zero-hours – although much of the detail there will come later in terms of qualifying periods and whatnot.
A new framework to set pay and conditions in the adult social care sector will also impact more students than the sector often cares to admit.
Frustratingly, there’s nothing in there that offers any clarity on seasonal work – lots of employers of students and the sector itself have highly variable demand (on both sides) for casual work, and there’s only vague stuff in there about permitted exemptions to be defined later. And agency workers of all sorts – at least for now – won’t be covered.
But in many ways it’s that stuff on zero hours – along with the jam tomorrow on unpaid internships – that represents, for me, a much wider disappointment.
Student specific strategies
In the nostalgia-soaked UK, there’s a tendency to still look shocked when stats repeatedly reveal that students are working – often quite long hours – whilst engaged in full-time study.
But one of the key things about student work is the need for flexibility. Cancelled shifts can be a pain for sure, but unlike many others in the economy, that flexibility – both within a given month and across variable demand (on both sides) patterns across the year – is crucial.
In little old Slovenia, there’s a dedicated regime that is designed around students earning while learning. Student work (študentsko delo) involves a special type of (more) flexible (than others get) contract, and dedicated agencies (studentski servis) offer lists of available student jobs and take care of payments – as well as doing some degree of labour law enforcement and promotion of the role of student work to local employers.
Students benefit from a net payment arrangement that includes accident insurance, and there’s a lower income tax on student earnings, and they have dedicated employment advice via the agencies. It helps them build work experience, develops soft skills, and provides employers in hospitality, administration and retail with a flexible and affordable workforce.
In the system, there’s also tiny little tax that employers pay on top of student wages – some goes directly to the state budget to fund services like a dedicated national skills recording platform for student workers’ CVs, and another little portion is allocated to student organisations, which use these funds to support student activities, scholarships, infrastructure, and advocacy.
Germany runs a system of student “minijobs”. Students can earn up to 538 euros per month (about around 10 hours per week or around 40 hours per month), and don’t pay tax or social security contributions. There’s also “werkstudent” contracts that allow students to work up to 20 hours per week in term time – unlike for other workers, employers are not obligated to offer long-term commitments, and students can easily exit the contract if their academic workload changes.
In France, a Contrat de Travail Étudiant is another dedicated type of contract designed for students, allowing them to balance studies and work. It includes reduced working hours (less than 20 hours per week) so as not to interfere with studies – and is commonly used in sectors like hospitality, retail, and services.
Belgium too has a dedicated system. Students can work up to 600 hours per year with reduced social security contributions, making it cheaper for employers to employ them. Students benefit from lower tax rates and retain certain social security rights, but are not entitled to full employment benefits such as unemployment insurance.
In some countries there are also systems of national pay setting and bargaining for students who teach or act as teaching assistants or demonstrators inside universities – and in some, students on placement who also provide valuable cover in that business or service are paid for their time – partly because they have less of it to enable them to earn on the side. Many countries’ universities employ far more students than is the usual case in the UK. And some countries pay their PGRs a proper wage, or at least a proper stipend.
Imagine if there was a plan
The point isn’t that any of the above systems are perfect, and nor should students be seen as a “special case”. The point is that each country has, at some point, sat down and planned out a strategy designed to improve the volume, quality and suitability of student work as part of the overall higher education experience – in conjunction with and in recognition of the hours of study implied in the ECTS credit system and their wider student finance systems.
Back here in the UK a mixture of devolution complexities, the ongoing problem of government departmental silos and the abject failure of all four of our student finance systems to properly consider what it is that students need, or the volume of work that they should be undertaking, likely makes the above a pipe dream without the policy bandwidth to achieve it. As with housing and health, it’s clear that students are seen by the Department for Business and Trade as DfE or the devolved nations’ problem.
But without a dedicated system, the reasonable and understandable drive to reduce exploitative and hyper-flexible contracts for the wider workforce runs real risks – that students, forgotten as usual, will find it even harder than now to find work that, in the government’s word, pays.
Are we ever going back to a system where even maintenance loans fully cover the costs of full-time study? Sadly, I doubt it. And unless ministers are about to do something very different to their predecessors, they’re going to argue that students can and should work. The least they can do is think about it properly and coordinate across Whitehall, if for no other reason than to reduce the demonization they face from a public that still thinks they’re all living it up on a fat grant.
Even if the government doesn’t work, students very much do. A proper national strategy around it – with some inspiration from our friends in Europe – would be good for employers, good for students, good for the economy and good for higher education in general.
