Medical Appointments

This post is simply to clarify the procedure followed for medical appointments.

  • Medical appointments do NOT affect your scoring on the Bradford Factor if a medical letter or appointment card is shown
  • These are input into ITrent as sickness and are characterised as ‘medical appointments’ so therefore don’t count on the Bradford Factor
  • You will be asked to ‘make up’ the time that you are absent for medical appointments and this needs to be agreed with your line manager
  • You can ask for TOIL / Annual Leave / Unpaid Leave / Sickness instead of ‘making up’ the time for these appointments [Remember – any sickness taken will count against you on the Bradford Factor!]

 

medical

Entitlement to free eye test / discount on glasses!

If you regularly use a VDU (Visual Display Unit – computer monitor) at Dudley College, then you are entitled to the following:

£20 off your eye tests

£30 off frames

£80 off lenses

You will need to provide the original receipt and a note from your optician stating the glasses are for VDU use. Once this has all been checked and approved, you would then be notified that a cheque is ready for collection from our finance dept.

glasses

PMR (Performance Management Review)

This is a process of annual reviews that all tutors must undertake on a 1-to-1 basis by achieving a number of set targets throughout the year. These targets have increased significantly in the last few years and many questions have been asked on how attainable they actually are. It clearly states in the ‘Performance Management’ procedure that the targets set must follow strict guidelines:

PMR

Tutors should not agree to unrealistic targets as they will be held directly accountable when those targets haven’t been met. Dudley College uses these PMR scores to justify pay increments and also to justify whether to keep a member of staff should they be put at risk of redundancy.

CPD (Continued Professional Development)

At Dudley College, you are entitled to 4 CPD days per academic year. This is detailed in the ‘Working Time Policy’:

CPD

Examples of Scholarly activity:

Reading latest journal articles
Going on external courses
Doing online courses related to your job
Watching youtube videos relating to your role to develop your skills
Reading around a new subject you are delivering
Reading new exam regulations

PMR – Hot Topic

PMRs are a hot topic that we will be talking about in our next meeting.
    1. Have you started to think what your PMR targets could be for next year?
    2. Do you feel your targets in the past have been difficult to achieve? Why?
    3. Can you give an example of a vague, unrealistic, subjective or unachievable target you have been set before?
Please take the time to answer these questions in order to improve our UCU branch at Dudley College and work together to improve our services.
 
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LDD Team redundancy threat – Summer 2015

You may not be aware that in the summer the LDD section was under threat of redundancy. The team were told that not enough students had been enrolled and that they wouldn’t need as many teachers so two teachers would need to be made redundant.

After a few meetings with the team we invited the Regional Officer (Teresa Corr) to come and talk to the LDD team and then to represent each union member of that team in one to one meetings they would have with Senior Management.

Fortunately, through analysis of timetables Teresa quickly concluded that what was happening what as a result of timetabling error. The LDD team with Teresa’s support were able to convince the college management that they were making teachers unnecessarily redundant by trying to bring in instructors in to replace lecturers. Just prior to that, unfortunately one teacher put in for voluntary redundancy. If we had not got Regional reps involved at this moment, there would indeed now be further job losses within that team, so we want to reassure all of our members at Dudley College that if we stick together on this we will be assured of our worker rights.

We see this as a huge victory for the union and all of us within it. We are totally committed to representing every one of you in whichever way we can and to have more regular meetings where issues can be discussed and we can have more clarity, transparency and a feeling of strength among us.

We hope you will join us to create an area for communication in this new UCU Dudley website and more importantly join us at the next meeting in October.

UCU Pay Claim – £1 per hour increase

Earlier this year UCU submitted a pay claim for 2015/16 for an increase of £1 an hour for all lecturer grades.

AoC has, however, recommended a 0% pay increase for this year which UCU has rejected and HQ is now making preparations to hold a national ballot of FE members about the AoC’s position.

From 1st August Dudley College has awarded a 1% increase to all members of staff. However, this does not equate to a £1 per hour increase and therefore does not match UCU’s demand.

Click here for more detail on the proposal: FE Strike Ballot

UCU Dudley College – Your views?

The attendance at UCU meeting has diminished hugely over recent years and we want to hear the reasons why from members directly. This forum is a completely anonymous platform for UCU members to voice their concerns in response to the following questions:
    1. Have you attended the any UCU meetings in the last year? Why / Why not?
    2. What are your views on how the meetings were conducted? Could you suggest possible improvements?
    3. Do you think that UCU at Dudley College could benefit from a branch committee with representatives for each campus?
Please take the time to answer these questions in order to improve our UCU branch at Dudley College and work together to improve our services.