Astronomic vice-chancellor pay is indicative of wider inequality – but we cannot let it dominate and distract us from other issues in higher education, argues the NUS’s Robbie Young

Many people have been, quite rightly, outraged by the current news headlines around vice-chancellor pay at both Bath and Bath Spa universities, but for those of who are students or involved in higher education this has been an uncomfortable truth across the United Kingdom for too long. As a graduate of Plymouth university I remember, as a student, cringing at the wage of our vice-chancellor, especially when compared to the wages of the lowest-paid university and student union employees, many of whom were fellow students. This wage was nowhere near the £800,000 payout that we have seen this week. But while we progressives are focusing on the issue of vice-chancellor pay, I do feel that we are somewhat letting universities secretary Jo Johnson off the hook.

We need to be careful that vice-chancellor pay does not become a distraction from other vitally important debates around university funding. Maintenance grants have been scrapped and replaced with loans, meaning that the poorest students will leave university with £57,000 worth of debt. Tuition fees have been trebled. Interest rates altered. And all this while the governments failing and expensive ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ (TEF) does nothing to improve the student experience or teaching quality. It is these issues that are having a huge impact on students and need to be properly tackled with radical and progressive changes to our education system.

That is just the experience of students. Staff at our universities up and down the country are not even being paid the living wage. By that I do not mean the ‘national living wage’ that was proposed by the Tories but the actual living wage set by the Living Wage Foundation. It is easy to get distracted by these grotesque inequalities that are rife within our education system, where public money is being used to prop up poverty pay, and it is easy to get outraged by our education system, because quite frankly, some of the things going on in our education system are outrageous. These things are continuing, despite the great work of campus trade unions and student unions working together to bring the issue of pay to the forefront and to rally behind a different vision of learning and teaching to that set out by the TEF.

I believe we should call for further scrutiny over vice-chancellor’s pay, transparency around all pay over £150,000 and fight to get universities to publish ratios between highest and lowest paid staff, as well as gender and race pay ratios. Additionally, I believe that it is absolutely vital that there is a strong student voice at the heart of remuneration committees, and where ever applicable that any money saved through cuts to vice-chancellor pay is channelled into student bursaries, widening participation and mental health services on campuses where it is so desperately needed.

We need to make sure that as the Labour party, and as progressives, we do not only fight this as a single issue campaign, and fall for the coats and dagger tricks that Johnson will want us to fall for, to distract from his failing education policies, but instead tackle all the problems students face head-on with radical solutions, with better funding and with increased transparency. By having a holistic approach to campaigning around higher education we can truly improve the student experience. Wage inequalities in our universities is not the be all and the end all, but a symptom of a far wider malaise that students need us to tackle.

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Robbie Young is vice president (society and citizenship) of the National Union of Students. He tweets at @Robbiie__

Photo: Jonathan Billinger/Geograph