PGTAs
The UCL-UCU PGTA campaign began during the 2018/19 Four Fights dispute, campaigning for secure contracts, fair pay, transparency, and no outsourcing.
It is so important that PGTAs join UCU. There are three categories of student membership available and the Postgraduate Teacher membership which is free for 12 months is available to PGTAs. For other student membership types please see this page.
If you would like to organise in your department, please get in touch! The Postgraduate Officer on the branch Executive Committee is Jessica Davies.
PGTAs’ rights:
UCL has a PGTA Code of Practice. You should make sure your department treats you at least as well as this, and come to us or complain if they don’t. This code has improved significantly following our pressure last year. Note in particular that:
- PGTAs should be paid at Grade 6: £18.72 – £21.55 per hour using the 24/25 scale (although this should be calculated as a fraction of a full-time job rather than hourly), increasing with each year’s experience. Please see below for more details on pay.
- PGTAs should receive additional pay in lieu of annual leave, and be paid for preparation and assessment time.
- PGTAs should receive employment contracts – not simply casual, informal agreements or zero-hours ‘terms of engagement’. We are employees, with rights to sick pay and parental leave.
- The generic PGTA job description and person specification is here. Departments should not expect you to do significantly more (or less) than this.
Unless you are engaged in genuine intermittent short-term working, you should have an employment contract. It is crucial you confirm this, as this is what will ensure you are entitled to sick pay.
At present, administrators in departments and faculties are attempting to convert ‘as and when’ contracts based on hours of work to ‘full time equivalents’ (FTEs) to put them on payroll. This is taking some time, and unfortunately current advice from HR is incomplete.
The biggest problem appears to be a confusion about adding the extra hours of annual leave earned by the employee for performing those hours of work in making the translation to FTE. (For hourly-paid staff who are not employees, annual leave must be added in as a separate payment so that it appears separately in payslips.)