Keegan wants ‘minimum service level’ on campuses during strikes

All the papers would have been marked and graded if UCEA had agreed to the reasonable inflation based pay improvements agreed in other sectors. Students know where the blame lies. The ball was in UCEA's court to avert the industrial action which would have been better for everybody. There was no mention of the financial hardship endured by those taking part in the marking and assessment boycott and strike action to try and secure a reasonable wage. Did Gillian Keegan worry how long the heating had been on last winter ? The punitive deductions were the thing that were outrageous. The sooner we have a general election the better, to stop the abuses of power we've seen such as the one advocated by the Education Secretary in the article. I really hope there is a change in approach both by UCEA and the UCU in the coming year to negotiate a reasonable settlement and prevent students and staff having to go through this cycle yet again.

An excellent way to create a brain drain. Drive down pay for 15 years, reduce the unit of resource & increase the ever-expanding and mutually contradictory sets of expectations on universities to the point that academics' work cannot be completed within anything like their contracted hours. The final logical stage is to prevent us doing anything about this, by instructing the remaining demoralised people teaching what the government designate as 'rip-off degrees' that paradoxically, our labour is so 'essential' that we are not at liberty to withdraw it, whilst not so essential that we actually be paid for all the hours that we work. This is intolerable in a free society. If academic work in the UK is to become a kind of forced labour at excessive hours for low pay and no collective bargaining, what incentive is there for highly educated people to remain in this profession?