Last month chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that this summer, VAT will be temporarily cut from 20 per cent to 5 per cent on a range of family activities – theme parks, fairs, zoos, museums, adventure parks, soft play and similar venues.
I expect that like in 2021 and 2022, this will be the first of many initiatives that fail to help students.
To be fair, many of the people selling tickets, operating rides, serving food, and keeping those parks running will be students on zero hours contracts, taking advantage of the summer break to earn some money before returning to university in September.
There is, however, a consultation running simultaneously that those students – and those employers – should know about. It raises questions about what “flexibility” means in practice, who bears the cost of it, and whether a framework rhetorically associated with insecure platform-style flexibility has yet been stress-tested against the structural realities of recurring seasonal and term-time employment.
From ban to baseline
Labour came into office promising to ban exploitative zero hours contracts in manifesto crayons. By the time the Employment Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, the commitment had pivoted to fountain pen – a ban had become an end to “one-sided flexibility.”
The zero hours contract itself would not disappear. What would change is the power relationship embedded in it.
The injustice the legislation is designed to address is real and well-evidenced. A worker on a zero hours contract could be working 40 hours a week for the same employer for years with no contractual guarantee of a single hour the next day, let alone the next month.
Workers can be told on a Tuesday morning that there is work for them Tuesday afternoon, or arrive for a shift only to be sent home unpaid. They can’t plan finances, apply for credit, rent a flat, or book a holiday with any confidence. The employer bears none of the risk of variable demand – the worker bears all of it.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 creates three new rights for workers in this position. There’s a right to a guaranteed hours offer reflecting the hours actually worked during a reference period. There’s a right to reasonable notice of shifts and changes to shifts. And a there’s to be a right to payment for shifts cancelled, curtailed or moved at short notice.
The consultation published yesterday seeks views on how these rights should be defined in regulations, given that the Act itself has not yet brought them into force.
The care worker, the reference period, and the point
Take a care worker on a zero hours contract, employed by a domiciliary care agency, consistently working 25 hours a week. Under the proposed framework, after a 12-week initial reference period – the government’s preferred length – the employer would be required to make a guaranteed hours offer.
That offer would be an offer to enter into a new or varied contract requiring the employer to provide, and the worker to work, a number of hours reflecting those worked during the reference period. So – roughly 25 hours a week, on an ongoing basis.
The worker can decline the offer and remain on the zero hours arrangement if they prefer. But if they accept, those hours are contractually guaranteed going forward. The employer can’t just stop providing work, cancel shifts without payment, or vary hours downwards without the worker’s agreement. At the end of each subsequent reference period, the process repeats – if the worker is still working in excess of their guaranteed hours, a new offer must be made.
The tribunal route is the core enforcement mechanism for all three rights, and the government is consulting on whether the Fair Work Agency – which began operating in April 2026 – should also enforce the short notice payment right, on the basis that a missed payment is a discrete, measurable event suited to the agency’s Notice of Underpayment regime.
Temporary need meets permanent pattern
The framework becomes more complicated when the employer’s demand is not unpredictable in the gig economy sense, but structurally seasonal – recurring every year, built into the business model, and entirely predictable in both its arrival and its disappearance.
Alton Towers is a near-perfect stress test. The park staffs up heavily from spring through to early autumn, then closes entirely for several weeks in winter. The returning seasonal worker – who comes back year after year, knows the rides and safety protocols, and costs less to retrain – is exactly the kind of worker the legislation might seem designed to help. And yet without adequate exemptions, the framework creates perverse incentives that work directly against that worker’s interests.
The Act allows limited-term contracts where it is reasonable for the employer to consider that a worker is only needed to perform a specific task, or that a worker is needed only until a particular event occurs. A fruit picker needed until the harvest ends, a conference worker needed until an event concludes – these map onto the statutory categories reasonably well.
But Alton Towers closing every November is not an “event” in this sense. It is a planned, predictable, recurring operational feature. The Act acknowledges a third category – “temporary need” to be specified in regulations – and the consultation explicitly recognises that these categories may not cover instances where a worker is only needed until demand decreases due to the time of year. It then asks what the regulations should say. It doesn’t propose an answer.
More damaging still is the “multiple workers’ contracts” presumption. Where a worker has been employed on multiple contracts doing the same or similar work, it is presumed that a limited-term contract is not reasonable – and the burden falls on the employer to rebut that.
The returning Alton Towers worker who comes back for a second summer is squarely within that presumption. The rational employer response, if the regulations land without a specific recurring-seasonal carve-out, is not to engage the same worker twice. That ends up looking like less protection for the people the legislation would otherwise protect.
PGRs that teach
Oh yeah, this is an HE blog. Well.
A postgraduate research student takes on seminar facilitation for a 12-week autumn term on a zero hours contract. The PGR needs the income, the university needs the teaching covered at lower cost than a permanent appointment, and the work is understood by both parties to be temporary and term-specific.
Under the framework as proposed, with a 12-week preferred reference period, your PGR working consistently through the term – say, eight hours a week including preparation – would reach the end of the reference period having met the regularity requirements. The university would be required to make a guaranteed hours offer – an offer of a new or varied contract guaranteeing approximately eight hours a week on an ongoing basis.
That offer would not be merely a promise for the next 12 weeks. It would be a contractual commitment that can’t be reduced through later reference periods without the worker’s agreement – and that ordinary contractual mechanisms such as termination, redundancy or a lawful limited-term contract would be needed to bring to an end.
The consultation asks how hours should be calculated – mean or median – and over what period they should be allocated. But term-time teaching is not a simple weekly average. A PGR working 12 hours a week in weeks one to six and six hours a week in weeks seven to twelve has worked an average of nine hours. Mean and median calculations would produce different figures in this scenario.
Either way, the policy question of what kind of contractual pattern that average is supposed to become – when the work itself does not recur evenly across the year, and when the reference period ends at the same moment the engagement does – is one the consultation has not yet answered.
The multiple-contracts presumption then hits with particular force. PGR teaching is almost universally structured as repeated short engagements – one per semester, or one per academic year, across multiple years of the doctorate. The same module, the same role, the same institution. The presumption that multiple contracts for the same work renders a limited-term arrangement unreasonable applies directly. The burden shifts to the university to show otherwise.
The rational employer response is to end the engagement at Christmas and take on a different PGR in January. The university has an effectively unlimited supply of new doctoral students who have zero reference period history and generate no obligations. The legislation, without exemptions, would actively reward exploiting the built-in churn of doctoral cohorts.
The one group explicitly intended to benefit from the legislation – the insecure worker in a repeatedly-renewed casual relationship with the same employer – would be made worse off, because the law had made it rational to deny them continuity altogether.
Open days are fine
Universities also use students extensively as ambassadors – for open days, clearing, school visits, prospectus shoots, and a range of similar activities. The legal position here is considerably cleaner than the PGR case, because these activities map more naturally onto the Act’s event-based exemption categories.
An open day is close to a textbook “particular event” – it occurs on a defined date, the contract can reasonably terminate when it ends, and nobody would argue the university has a continuing need for open day stewards in February. Clearing has a defined window tied to A-level results. Individual school visits are discrete engagements.
The problem arises where universities use student ambassador pools not for discrete events but as a general flexible resource deployed across multiple activities throughout the academic year – open day in June, clearing in August, freshers’ fair in September, school visit in November.
The same student appearing across all of these starts to look less like event-specific temporary employment and more like a general zero hours arrangement with a branded job title. And the recurring-year structure – the same student in the same ambassador role across two or three undergraduate years – reproduces the Alton Towers problem in a different setting.
Last orders at Christmas
The worst version of the problem – and the one with the most uncomfortable institutional dimensions – is the student working in a students’ union bar, café, shop, or administrative function during term time.
Take a student working 10 hours a week in their SU’s cafe bar through the 12-week autumn term. They work consistently, they meet the regularity requirements, the reference period completes. The SU is obliged to make a guaranteed hours offer of 10 hours a week on an ongoing contractual basis. If the student accepts, they have a contract guaranteeing those hours every week going forward.
The venue then closes for Christmas. The SU cannot provide the hours. There is no applicable “exceptional circumstances” exemption – the consultation’s examples include employers whose premises are flooded, not employers that close every year because students have gone home. The SU is potentially in breach of contract for every week of the vacation it fails to provide the guaranteed hours.
The workarounds available are unpalatable. The SU could terminate every student worker’s engagement shortly before the 12-week reference period completes – but an SU that deliberately ends contracts to avoid giving its own student members employment rights has a reputational problem of some significance.
It could vary each student’s contract mid-term to guarantee exactly the hours they are already working, taking them out of scope because they are no longer working in excess of guaranteed hours – but this is administratively demanding, legally uncertain as a potential detriment under the Act, and the kind of manoeuvre that workers notice and resent.
It could simply not re-engage the same students each term – but that is the chilling effect again.
A fourth option exists on paper – a collective agreement with a recognised independent trade union, which under the Act is the only mechanism by which an employer can opt out of the guaranteed hours regime entirely.
For universities and larger SUs with recognised unions – UCU, Unison, Unite – this route is at least theoretically available. But even if its students were members of it and feeding in, it places those unions in an impossible position. Their consistent position has been that casualisation in higher education is a problem to be solved, not negotiated around.
Agreeing terms that modify or disapply the guaranteed hours right for student workers and PGRs – even in exchange for something else – is politically very difficult. And for smaller SUs without relevant recognition agreements, the route is simply not available at all. There is no opt-out mechanism for non-unionised workplaces.
A fifth option is to push the work through agencies rather than direct engagement. But this would not simply make the issue someone else’s problem. The consultation’s default position is that the hirer makes guaranteed hours offers to qualifying agency workers, although it also asks whether some scenarios should place the duty on the agency or another intermediary.
Agency work is not an obvious escape route from the policy problem. It may instead reproduce exactly the same question through a three-party relationship – adding cost and complexity without resolving the underlying tension between the framework’s design and the realities of term-time employment.
And anyway, the workarounds reduce protection rather than extending it. The student working in the SU bar because their maintenance loan does not cover their rent is precisely the person the legislation is designed to help. The effect of the framework, without suitable exemptions, is to make it legally rational for their own SU or university to deny them the continuity of employment that would actually give them the security they need.
There is a more creative route available through the consultation. Regulations could recognise recurring academic terms as a form of temporary or periodic need. A term-time-only guaranteed hours contract – one that guarantees specified hours during defined teaching periods, suspends the obligation during vacations, and reactivates automatically at the start of each subsequent term – would give workers security where the work actually exists, without pretending that a closed campus bar or completed teaching block generates year-round demand.
Term time zero times
Running through all of these scenarios is a structural feature of British education employment that the consultation – and apparently the policy development that preceded it – has not engaged with at all.
Term-time working is not a marginal edge case. It is the structural basis on which huge numbers of workers across the education sector are employed – school teaching assistants, further education sessional staff, university casual academic workers, student workers in campus facilities, and students themselves working in term-time jobs. The seasonal pattern recurs three times a year, every year, across institutions governed by a broadly consistent academic calendar that has been in operation for generations.
The consultation contains four mentions of the word “seasonal.” One is in the contents page. One is a passing reference in the introduction. One is a section heading. One is a single, explicit acknowledgment that the framework may not cover situations where a worker is only needed until demand decreases due to the time of year – followed by an open question about what to do about it. “Term time” does not appear at all.
As usual in a consultation published by another department, the Department for Education (DfE) has no visible presence in it. There appears to be no cross-departmental analysis of how the framework interacts with the term-time working patterns structural to the entire maintained, further education, and higher education sectors. Teaching assistants, lunchtime supervisors, wraparound care workers, and exam invigilators – all typically engaged on casual or low-hours contracts tied to the academic term – are not mentioned.
I know I say this roughly once a fortnight on here, but I just can’t understand how a policy designed to protect insecure workers, developed over several years of consultation and parliamentary scrutiny, arrived at Royal Assent without anyone apparently asking what it means for the single largest category of structurally seasonal employment in the country.
Exempting students from their own rights
One obvious response to the student-specific problems is to argue through Q26 of the consultation that registered full-time students should be a specified excluded worker category, simply outside the scope of the guaranteed hours right. The Act’s definition of “excluded worker” is remarkably open – it means “a worker who is of a specified description,” with no further constraint. A student-specific exclusion is legally available within the existing framework.
But it is a bad answer to the problem it purports to solve. The government’s own factsheet on the reforms acknowledges that changes “will not take away that flexibility for workers who agree to that way of working” – but the phrase “workers who agree to that way of working” is doing enormous work. It implies the flexibility is chosen. For many students, it is not a choice but a financial necessity.
Exempting full-time students from the guaranteed hours right would be a declaration that the most financially precarious group of casual workers in the education sector deserves no protection at all. A university or SU arguing publicly for this position in its consultation response would be arguing against the labour rights of its own members. The political and institutional logic is difficult to defend.
Carving out specific types of employer – term-time operators, students’ unions, educational institutions – rather than specific types of worker is a marginally better framing, but it is still a bodge. It removes the obligation rather than redesigning the relationship. It answers the question “how do we make this framework less damaging” rather than the more important question “what framework would actually work?”. And what about all those businesses in town that scale up when students are around, and then scale down when they’re not?
Meanwhile, in Ljubljana
There is a better model.
In Slovenia, student employment operates through a distinct legal category called “student work” – temporary and occasional work for secondary school pupils and university students, administered through authorised Student Services agencies holding concession contracts from the Ministry of Labour. The referral form – issued by the agency – is the legal basis for every engagement. There is no employment contract in the standard sense. Each piece of work is authorised through a referral, the employer records hours worked against it, and payment flows through the agency.
Employers pay tiny charges on top of wages – covering pension and disability insurance contributions and concession fees – a portion of which flows to the wider student-work infrastructure, including student organisations and student housing improvement. The precise distribution has varied over time as the system has been reformed, but the structural principle is consistent – student employment generates an automatic contribution to the representative and support infrastructure around it, rather than relying on political negotiation over block grants.
The model is self-funding and structurally coherent in a way that British students’ unions, dependent on block grants from their universities, are not. The more students work, the more money flows to the organisations that represent them. Student Services agencies are required to cooperate with the Slovenian Student Organisation – and the whole system is designed so that the interests of representation and employment align, rather than conflict.
The student works with genuine flexibility in both directions. Referrals can be picked up or dropped according to academic commitments. The employer engages workers when needed without accumulating ongoing contractual obligations. There is no reference period, no guaranteed hours offer, no multiple-contracts presumption – because “student work” sits outside the standard employment relationship entirely, with its own minimum hourly rates, its own insurance for workplace injuries, and its own enforcement mechanism.
A platform called “Moje izkušnje” – “My experience” – allows students to record and document the skills and competencies gained through student work, including hours worked, employers, work type, and competencies acquired.
Could something like this be created through regulations under the Employment Rights Act 2025? That ship has sailed. The Act’s excluded worker power is wide enough to create a student-specific exemption from the guaranteed hours right. But it can’t create a parallel legal infrastructure, impose a levy on employers, fund student organisations, or establish authorised intermediary agencies.
Those things would require primary legislation, sustained cross-departmental coordination between DBT, DfE and HMRC, and a level of ambition about the relationship between student status and working life that was in the “opportunity mission” in theory, but that the current consultation does not begin to approach in practice.
Summer has gone
The consultation on “Make Work Pay: ending one-sided flexibility – reforms of zero hours and similar contracts” closes on 25 August 2026 – just as the Great British Summer Savings VAT cut comes to an end and when we find out with more certainly how hard energy spikes and food inflation will hit students this coming year.
It honestly is not that hard to imagine a set of rules that can offer appropriate protection to students in recognition of their need to earn while learning. But as long as the Great British silo-d state continues to ignore students is as long as handouts this winter will miss them, and regs designed to protect their employment run the risk of making their work even more precarious than it is now.
