UCU leader: strikes coming as staff are ‘burnt out and leaving sector’

V-c warns pension and pay strikes will damage whole sector but union members believe experience shows industrial action will force change

Published on
November 5, 2019
Last updated
November 14, 2019
Anna McKie
USS strike
Source: Alamy
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Higher education pensions
Employment issues
Higher education unions

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Print headline: Winter of walkouts ahead

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Reader's comments (5)

#1 Submitted by Classic on November 5, 2019 - 9:13am
Oh please. Since students hardly ever see their lecturers and instead are given fofo one wonders at the quality of teaching at any university unless and until they are assessed by external inspectors. That means that the university does not have tame in house people doing a back slapping job. That has been seen before and it reeks of self congratulation. To receive better pay and or pensions they need to be assessed.
#2 Submitted by NJF on November 5, 2019 - 10:21am
As most lecturing academics have NO formal pedagogical training or qualifications this could be a hiding to nothing situation. I have technicians with the requisite qualifications, yet they may only 'demonstrate' and must not put 'teaching' on their TCR timesheets, no matter that the academic lecturers and course leaders may only 'teach' a few times in the limited part-time hours they are actually on campus per year, leaving the bulk of actual teaching to the technical staff. Zero hours, and to a degree zero responsibility, contracts are the norm in many Universities now. And when non-scientist academics want to spend time campaigning on such things as climate one has to question if the courses they 'teach' are academically rigorous or are simply indoctrination?
#3 Submitted by Ferdinand on November 5, 2019 - 11:24am
And yet there are some that do have such qualifications and in my experience they are the worst of the lot. There's an old saying, 'those who can do, those who can't teach' I don't agree with that, but I think there is some truth in this addition: 'and those who can't teach, get a teaching qualification and carry on regardless'
#4 Submitted by i.... on November 6, 2019 - 1:47pm
What a lot of non-sense. Our students get 24 hours of contact time a week. I am teaching 10 hours of classes in 4 different modules this week. Even if I only did the university estimate of 2 hours prep work for each (and I do more like 4), that still nearly a full time job in it self. But its only supposed to be 40% of my time. On top of that I am expected to manage a research team of 7 people and a turn-over of nearly £0.5M. And I have several admin jobs to do. This week I am also submitting a grant in a vain attempt to find the money needed to stop one of my PhD students from being deported.
#5 Submitted by daver on November 6, 2019 - 10:08pm
Ian, I know what you mean but there is little chance is persuading the sort of people who think that because the students get the summer off, then so do the academics. It's as if all the grant applications and papers we are expected to produce come by magic. Not to mention the safety committees, student progress meetings, resit exams, module review meetings personal tutor and adviser of studies work, that apparently take up no time.

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