Further education has been shoved a step closer to its most serious industrial conflict in decades by the refusal of the education secretary, Estelle Morris, to deliver a concrete public promise on pay.
In solidarity unprecedented in the sector's history, unions representing all college staff - lecturers, managers and all grades of support and administrative staff - plan to ballot members on taking industrial action. A strike to coincide with Labour's annual conference in the first week of October is one tactic under unofficial discussion.
Hopes within the lecturers' union, Natfhe, that the education secretary would use some of her budget surplus to boost this year's pay offer were firmly dashed in her much-heralded speech on reforming further education.
More seriously, she warned Natfhe that she would not be able to "solve" their pressing concern to bridge the pay gap with schoolteachers in November - after she knows what education's slice of the current comprehensive spending review (CSR) will be for the next three years.
Paul Mackney, Natfhe's general secretary, said the union halted last year's industrial action because of government promises on pay parity by September 2004.
"People feel betrayed by this government," he said. "All the other FE unions are talking about industrial action that is likely to coincide with the Labour party conference."
Gerald Imison, deputy general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: "For a union like ATL to be contemplating strike action with Natfhe would have been unthinkable two years ago."
Unison, which represents 26,000 support staff in colleges, is angry that no mention was made of broadening the teachers' pay initiative for lecturers into a "colleges' pay initiative" to cover its members as well. The wider notion of CPI has been accepted by all unions in the joint forum negotiating further education pay.
An earlier version of Success For All, the discussion document on reforming further education and training issued with Estelle Morris's speech, included the term "colleges' pay initiative", but this was missing from the final published document.
Unison's senior national education officer, Christina McAnea, warned that overlooking CPI would "harden attitudes" among members who are being urged by the union's executive to reject the latest 2.3% pay offer and take industrial action in the autumn.
In her speech, the education secretary said she was aware of the concern about a schoolteacher-lecturer pay gap "greater than at any time since 1997", although its size was open to debate.
"You'll have to wait until the spending review settlement comes along," she said, before ruling out using a £43m budget "underspend" to boost the current 2.3% pay offer to lecturers. To use this year's "underspend" on pay would reduce next year's "core funding" to colleges, she said. "I'm not going to tie my hands at this point during my planning cycle."
But it was her unscripted response to a question from the audience after the speech to the Learning and Skills Development Agency's annual conference which raised fears that, even after the results of the comprehensive spending review are published next month, their expectations on the pay issue will not be met.
Asked by Natfhe's national colleges official, Barry Lovejoy, about plans to bridge the pay gap, she said she would resist "giving pots of money out just to make people happy"although she was "not unsympathetic" to his case. "But I can't solve it today and I won't be able to solve it in November," she said.
In November she is expected to announce the outcome of the consultation on the further education review programme at the Association of Colleges' annual conference.
DfES officials could not clarify whetherMorris's remark was hinting that there would be good news on pay, albeit not to the extent that Natfhe wants, or whether she was hinting at a bleaker outcome for the workforce.
