Created on: 19 Oct 2026
In his recent article, the Chair of College Employers Scotland quite rightly acknowledges that colleges are fundamentally “people organisations” and as such the workforce is central to their core purpose.
He then proceeds to identify what he considers to be the problem with that workforce which is, in essence, it’s cost. He argues that despite significant reductions in staffing, college workers still account for 70% of expenditure across the sector.
There is a fundamental contradiction in this argument. If colleges are people organisations, then it should hardly come as any surprise that employing people accounts for most of their expenditure. Further education is a labour-intensive public service.
The same is true of schools, healthcare, social work and other public sector institutions, including Colleges Scotland and College Employers Scotland for that matter. The proportion of expenditure allocated to staffing is not in itself evidence of inefficiency, excessive costs or financial unsustainability.
This argument also raises an obvious question - what proportion of expenditure would college employers consider to be acceptable? If staffing continues to account for 70% of expenditure after substantial workforce reductions, are we to conclude that further reductions are necessary until some unspecified percentage is reached? Where does that process end?
The article acknowledges that workforce reductions alone cannot secure longer term financial sustainability, yet much of the argument continues to centre on changing workforce arrangements, increasing “flexibility” and reviewing current structures.
Yet if successive reductions in staffing have failed to resolve the sector's financial difficulties, surely the starting point should be to question the effectiveness of that approach in the first place rather than seek further changes to the conditions of the remaining workforce?
The article presents “flexibility” and income diversification as “necessary” responses to financial pressures, without establishing exactly how these would improve financial sustainability, educational provision or working conditions.
The real issue is not flexibility itself, but who gets to decide what it is, how it works, who benefits from it and who pays the price.
There is a fundamental difference between flexibility for employers and flexibility for workers. When flexibility means that college management can continually change working arrangements, increase workloads, rely on temporary or agency staff, increase class sizes and class contact hours, and redeploy lecturers according to operational demands, it is management that gains “flexibility” while workers are left in a precarious position, losing agency, security and control over their professional lives.
That is not flexibility in any meaningful or mutual sense. All it amounts to is the transfer of organisational risk from the employer to the workforce.
The language of workforce flexibility treats lecturers as commodities whose labour can be bought, exploited and discarded according to the financial interests of the employer.
This reduces highly skilled professionals to mere units of labour whose value is measured by cost and productivity, rather than by their knowledge, skills and contribution to education.
Flexibility, on management terms, prioritises extracting more labour from fewer workers but colleges are not private businesses whose chief purpose is the appropriation of surplus value to generate profits - colleges are publicly funded institutions constituted to provide education as a public good.
As such, their chief purpose is to ensure that the education they deliver meets the needs of students and the communities they serve.
Yet the language of workforce flexibility treats lecturers as a financial liability to be managed, rather than the very means through which colleges fulfil their educational purpose.
If College Employers Scotland genuinely want an evidence-led discussion about the future of the sector, that discussion must extend beyond an analysis of the workforce.
It must examine the consequences of previous staffing reductions, the costs and effectiveness of existing management structures, the basis of financial decision making, and the governance arrangements through which decisions are made.
It must also question the assumption that colleges can continually reduce staffing, expand commercial activity and increase workforce “flexibility” without compromising their core purpose to deliver education as a public good.
A genuinely sustainable college sector must begin by recognising that its workforce is not a commodity to be continually rationalised in response to financial pressures.
College lecturers are not merely a cost of delivering education. Their professional labour is what makes further education possible now and in the future.
-Dr Thora Hands