Dr David Schwarz, Social Partnership Lead - Coleg Cambria
In Wales, Social Partnership (SP) is increasingly positioned as a cornerstone of public service governance. The Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Act (SPPPA) provides a national framework for this approach. While further education colleges are not currently bound by the same statutory duties as bodies such as Medr, at Coleg Cambria, social partnership has evolved from aspiration into operational reality.
I am coming to the end of my fourth year as Social Partnership Lead, a role originally planned for three years, but extended to help a new Deputy CEO and HR Director settle in. As we look to appoint our next SP Lead, this milestone feels like the right time to look back at how we moved from a place where relationships were strained, to collaboration, and to share a practical blueprint for the post-compulsory education and training (PCET) sector.
Our partnership emerged in 2022 out of challenging conditions relating to restructuring and potential redundancy, and TU branches ready for industrial action. The process began when the leader of UCU Wales took a risk and called our CEO to explore an alternative path. We did not work in a vacuum during this transition. We utilised guidance and exemplar agreements and are grateful to the Welsh Government for funding support through an independent expert, the Involvement and Participation Association (IPA). They helped us to understand the core concepts, adopt the national guiding principles, and tailor them to our bespoke context. This created our shared charter: a leap of faith from both sides, committing to work constructively for a better workplace.
Embedding Partnership into Operations
To make this leap of faith work practically, we had to change how we operated. Traditional union structures are often kept at a distance from the day-to-day operational realities of how a college runs. Our model changes that by embedding union representatives directly into the college’s decision-making framework.
We achieved this by combining strategic leadership from the top with structured operational alignment. Our CEO works directly with the SP lead to discuss strategic-level information frequently and transparently. This relationship is replicated throughout the organisation. We give our nine SP representatives and their management counterparts time to meet both informally and through the same operational and approval structures already used by the college. We even have a representative on the Board of Governors.
We no longer view this as remission or time off for either the reps or the managers. It is a frontloading of work. By investing time at the start of a process, we prevent costly disputes later. While all SP reps are trade union reps (who agree to work to our SP principles), we also strictly ensure that the social partnership and branch negotiation structures remain separate. This preserves our traditional industrial relations and ensures our partnership is built on a foundation of relative strength, not a compromise of union independence.
Early Friction and Scepticism
As the partnership transitioned from concept to reality, both sides had to work through early frictions to find a practical rhythm. Very early efforts were hampered by over-focusing on procedural issues and complex confidentiality agreements, though these were simple to resolve in practice. However, the deeper hurdles were cultural. We faced significant scepticism on two distinct fronts.
First, there was managerial scepticism driven by a fear of losing control or agency. In traditional authoritarian management styles, strict top-down control is the norm. However, contemporary management theory points us towards people-centred, agile, and consultative management as the most effective approach. Managers have not lost control in our model; they are still responsible for decisions, but they now need to be able to better articulate the "why."
Our colleagues are highly experienced, qualified, motivated, and passionate. Traditional hierarchical decision-making alone is increasingly insufficient in complex educational environments. Managers must make the call, but they must also ensure it is well-consulted, informed, and they must be able to respond effectively to being challenged. This is not management on easy mode. In fact, this cultural shift has developed to the point where, in our person specifications moving forward, a demonstrable commitment to the principles of Social Partnership is listed as "Essential." Progress means that our expectations of leadership are evolving, and our role descriptions now reflect this new, collaborative standard.
Second, there was scepticism from colleagues and union members. A worry emerged that things would be agreed upon in secret, excluding wider viewpoints. Some assumed that by working closely with managers, we were just adding another layer to a closed "inner circle." We had to work hard to prove that SP reps proactively reach out to members and non-members alike, gathering the best information to feed back persuasively. The formal decision-making mechanisms: managers, policy committees, and formally minuted actions - still rule. The difference is that we work to ensure there is a voice in the room representing the colleagues who are actually impacted by those decisions.
A Partnership Approach to AI
An example of how this frontloaded, collaborative work pays off is our approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the first things we discussed in earnest after setting up our structures.
When generative AI first emerged, colleagues in other organisations were rightly worried. Ed-tech companies were approaching managers with questionable promises. In some institutions, staff were handed new tools without consultation, told how much time the tools saved, and then immediately burdened with extra work to fill that "saved" time.
We wanted to avoid this trap and address this fundamental external threat early. We co-authored an AI Pledge & Toolkit. Our core agreement dictates that AI must be used to enhance rather than replace human capabilities.
We consulted with colleagues and set up specific guidance to give staff autonomy. AI tools are available to those who wish to use them, but not mandatory. While we did restrict official support to a select couple of tools, we only did so for highly justifiable reasons: to ensure data security and to properly train our less tech-savvy colleagues on systems that are genuinely useful. We secured investment for AI/Digital Support Hubs to actively upskill our staff. By focusing on meaningful work rather than just efficiency metrics, we are protecting colleagues from technological displacement.
Proactive Operations
Over time, our partnership evolved beyond a reactive consultative mechanism into a standing operational infrastructure for organisational problem-solving. We now co-author policies as standard working practice. This has led to highly tangible improvements:
- Solving Issues Early and Silo-Busting: We established Common Interest Groups to address operational and workload issues early as an ongoing approach. Through this, we fix many issues before they get out of hand, proactively agreeing on changes like class size caps, workload focuses and removing manual data entry. This intercepts burnout and helps us to silo-bust across the college. Because we handle these things at the ground level, the volume of grievances needing to be raised through formal industrial channels, like the Joint Negotiating and Consultative Committee, has plummeted.
- Improving Wellbeing Equitably: We recently re-wrote the Sickness Absence Policy to completely remove zero absence targets and created a bespoke, paid Disability Leave Policy. This directly removes common triggers for individual grievances. The policy still allows the college to manage absences effectively, but it does so in a people-centred, action-focused way, rather than relying on punitive and outdated metrics like the Bradford Factor, which can disproportionately disadvantage some colleagues, particularly disabled staff or those with chronic conditions. Additionally, we set up a lived experience panel. We are currently revisiting this panel to ensure all perspectives are considered equitably by specifically mapping the intersectional experiences of its members.
- Elevating the Learner Voice: When reviewing the SPPPA, we identified a structural gap: it effectively omits the ultimate stakeholders in our sector. While the Act certainly doesn't preclude their involvement, they aren't explicitly mentioned. Following an internal review, we proactively expanded our SP structure to include a dedicated Student Partnership Representative. The aim is to give students a direct, supported voice in high-level strategic decisions alongside our joint trade union structure. This elevates them beyond the day-to-day operational feedback of traditional "learner voice" forums, which we have carefully retained.
- A Contemporary Workforce: We are on the cusp of an Agile Working Framework. This framework will give colleagues the autonomy to work in the way that suits them best, putting us ahead of the curve in the education sector. This also gives our colleagues the actual bandwidth required to maintain industry currency.
- Rooted in the Community: To support the local economy, we negotiated an Addysgwr Dwyieithog (Bilingual Educator) agreement. It pays up to £1500 p.a. and provides paid time during work hours to learn Welsh. Furthermore, we have secured three days of paid Volunteering Leave, giving colleagues more opportunities to build iterative relationships with the local community and businesses.
A Perspective from the CEO: Yana Williams
“As leaders, we know that empathy, communication and integrity are key traits, but we can be misguided by a belief that we have considered these when presenting an "almost complete" decision to our colleagues and Unions. Social Partnership grounds us; it makes us consider the impact of potential decisions, policies and procedures before we make a change, or conversely, we make a change because we know the impact of previous decisions and policies on our colleagues. A values-based organisation, particularly in the public sector, is never successful because of one person or one leadership team; it is the result of a collective and professional workforce coming together to achieve a shared vision.”
Conclusion
Creating and maintaining a successful social partnership is challenging. It requires continuous hard work, mutual trust, and a willingness to occasionally walk decisions back to the conceptual stage. However, the overarching intent is uniformly recognised: both sides share the goal of creating a great work environment.
Our informed policies and collaborative culture are leading to a stability that enables the college to weather sector-wide storms that others currently cannot. We are proud to be the only college in Wales to have promised no compulsory redundancies this academic year. When we talk to colleagues in other institutions, it is clear that our staff are broadly on a much more stable footing.
Social partnership succeeds when it ceases to be treated as an industrial-relations add-on and instead becomes embedded organisational infrastructure. It conducts so much essential consultative and research legwork that removing it would actively harm the day-to-day functional effectiveness of our organisation. It proves that shared aims lead to shared prosperity when seen through on a long-term, institutional level. It is not a utopian vision; it is a practical, tested reality, and a compelling option for the future of Welsh education.