Email sent to members on Monday 11th May 2026
As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails, authored by different UCU members, examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we look back at our victory in the local Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) in 2022. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
Memories of a local MAB
It was spring half term. As usual, we were in Cornwall, at the Valley Caravan Park in Polzeath. We go there every year. If you haven’t been you should. It’s a surfers’ paradise.
On this occasion I left my young family playing on the beach and headed back to the caravan. I had a crunch meeting with management. We were a few weeks into a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) and management was desperate to draw it to a close.
Representing UCU was me, Lopa and the legendary Agnes. Lopa played good cop, I played bad. Agnes was just Agnes. She never stood for any crap but at the same time, she had an uncanny ability to win over management. We miss her.
Representing the other side was the then registrar, the CFO and the head of HR. All of them have since left – some under a cloud following the fiasco that was the purchase of castle meadow campus.
This was the MAB of 2022. A local affair where everyone in the call had agency. As representatives of the local UCU branch, we had the power to return to our members and call off the action. As the representatives of university management, the trio on the other side had the power to deliver on our demands.
This changed everything. Although one member of the managerial team entered the meeting all bullish and macho, dismissing our requests as impossible, he was soon sidelined by the other two, more serious operators. They were ready to deal. They saw that the MAB was causing chaos – that the students were up in arms – and they knew they could do something about it. They could talk to UCU – to me, Lopa, and Agnes – and see what they could do to bring it to an end.
We had the upper hand right from the start. We had the power given to us by you, the members who were taking action. In the end, it was no surprise that we secured a resounding victory. Management agreed to a package of measures across the board: full transparency on gender and ethnicity pay gaps alongside a jointly developed action plan to reduce them; steps to tackle casualisation, including restricting the use of temp agencies and rolling out the Graduate Teaching Assistant model; a pay uplift for colleagues at the top of grades 4–6; agreed principles on pensions to ensure that any future improvements would benefit members rather than reduce employer contributions; and joint work to bring workloads down to manageable levels through more realistic modelling and proper review of staff–student ratios. Most, if not all, of these measures have held up over the last four years.
When we finally put this deal to members, I was on a day trip to Padstow, sharing details about the pension deal with members via zoom from the harbour, surrounded by day trippers eating cream teas or fish and chips. My kids waited patiently with nets in the water, hoping to catch a crab. The members voted overwhelmingly for the deal we had secured. UCU Nottingham had won.
This was all possible because it was a parochial affair, just as it is now. The coming MAB will hurt management and they will know that they are responsible for stopping it. They won’t be able to hide behind national negotiators. This is their problem – no one else’s. And if they want to fix it, they know what they need to do.
Commit to no compulsory redundancies.
Protect staff.
Protect the future of the university
On behalf of the UoN UCU branch committee