Sally Hunt
British trade union leader
Sally Colette Hunt (born 1964) is a British trade union leader, the General Secretary of the Association of University Teachers until its merger into the new University and College Union (UCU), of which Hunt was the General Secretary until 2019.
Biography
Born in 1964 in Germany, where her father was teaching in a British forces school, Hunt was educated at a comprehensive school in Chippenham, Wiltshire. She studied international relations at the University of Sussex from 1983 until 1987, serving as vice-president of the students' union.
After leaving university, she worked as a nightclub bouncer, a bookshop assistant, and for two building society staff associations before joining the Association of University Teachers.
Hunt was the last General Secretary of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), having held that post since 2002. On 1 June 2006, the AUT merged with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) to form the UCU.
As head of the AUT, she and Paul Mackney (Head of NATFHE), led industrial action, over three years until 2006, in support of a pay rise for higher education staff exceeding 20%. The actions disrupted university exams and provision of marks across the UK. In the end, members voted heavily in favour of accepting a rise of 13.1% phased over the three years, with the final year's figure subject to further increase in line with inflation. The final year's figure was to be "2.5% or RPI, whichever is greater". In the end, the RPI was at its peak and was 5%, resulting in that being the level of the final year's pay rise.
Hunt also oversaw what appear to have been the biggest strikes in UK higher education history, the 2018 UK higher education strike.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7405166. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 2019, 1983 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sally Hunt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.