Dear Student, 

 

Thank you for taking time to write to me and to express your concerns below.  

  

I think it is important to highlight that the Instructor Assessor (IA) posts that the lecturers union (EIS-FELA) are taking local action over have been in place since February 2020, before the pandemic and were put in place after a lengthy consultation period with College staff and EIS-FELA which commenced in 2019.  

  

The consultation was designed to restructure the delivery for our vocational programmes. These are industry standard qualifications (VQ’s) that are very prescriptive and include the subjects of engineering, hairdressing, plumbing and electrical installation. The staff involved in delivering these subjects do not design the curriculum or assessments. They deliver on the standards required to show the learner is competent. Consequently they are not lecturers but Instructor Assessors. Through the consultation, a number of lecturer posts were removed and replaced with Instructor Assessors, 26 in total. In order to ensure job continuity, every lecturer under threat was offered a voluntary severance or redeployment to IA with four years conserved salary. The role of IA is not new to the sector; so what we were doing was identifying the need of industry and putting the appropriate structure in place.  

  

I can assure you that there are no other lecturer posts being considered for change to IA posts and that I have confirmed this to EIS-FELA as well as in a personal letter to every lecturer from myself. I am disappointed that despite this EIS-FELA have decided to proceed with local strike action, particularly considering national strike action was suspended in relation to this matter whilst a sector wide lecturer definition is being agreed.  

  

I also want to address your concerns about IA staff not providing the same level of support for students. While the content of the role between IA’s and lecturers is different as I outline above, what is not different is the level of support students should reasonably expect from any staff member involved in the delivery of their learning, irrespective of their individual job title. Should your experience differ from this, I would encourage you to raise this with either your curriculum manager or directly with myself. 

  

If, at the conclusion of the College complaints process, you remain dissatisfied, I would make you aware that you have the right to contact the Scottish Public Sector Ombudsman (SPSO), Freepost SPSO (telephone 0800 377 7330) for advice.  Please note the SPSO cannot normally offer advice on complaints more than 12 months after the matter you are complaining about, or that have been or are being considered in court. 

  

Yours sincerely 

  

Dr Ken Thomson 

Principal.