Hidden Redundancies: Edinburgh University Management Making Staff Redundant Under the Radar
With the latest news of Edinburgh University’s Vice-Chancellor, Peter Mathieson, receiving a pay rise and a paid appointment at the Roslin Institute, university management’s decision to push for redundancies amid budget cuts is growingly absurd. However, as staff wait for further clarification on the number of redundancies, Management has already been making cuts in less obvious ways.
By Aerin Lai, PhD researcher, Sociology, University of Edinburgh
Despite no decreases in student numbers, the employer has been hiring fewer tutors and demonstrators as a way to reduce costs. In actuality, like the ‘financial gap’, the employer has manufactured this scarcity of work. They do so by, for instance, increasing student numbers per tutorial group, thus reducing the number of groups assigned to tutors and demonstrators. For example, I was assigned 3 groups to teach this semester instead of the usual 4, even though I was teaching the same number of students. This means I would receive less pay per week as I was teaching even though the student numbers remain the same.
This newly announced round of budget cuts has exacerbated the uncertainty and precarity of these conditions further still. Since the start of this semester, across Schools, there have been many tutors who were not assigned any tutorial groups and, effectively, have been made redundant. For some early career researchers who were not assigned any groups this semester, this has meant moving away from Edinburgh as they could no longer afford to live here while searching for jobs.
These existing and proposed budget cuts also affect those with secure contracts. In the absence of GH tutors’ support, course convenors anticipate being expected to take on marking student assessments, an often substantial amount of work (100-200 essays) which would normally be divided among several tutors. With these increased workloads, it is highly probable that course organisers will be unable to return graded assessments to students ‘on time’ - a turnaround time of three weeks for most courses. In addition, staff feel that senior management’s sudden, still unevidenced announcement that £140 million of cuts per annum are necessary to ‘avoid’ deficit (a claim rejected definitively by the Joint Unions Finance Working Group) was announced at a deliberately awkward time with respect to planning for the coming academic year. One course convener, who wishes to remain anonymous, observed that the probability of GH staffing cuts was bruited only after the Board of Studies deadline for 2025-26, thereby removing the (already pedagogically offensive) option of eliminating assignments solely in order to alleviate marking pressure. They added that, in the current climate of widespread staff fear induced by the Principal’s claim that ‘nothing is off the table’, the timing also feels like purposely setting up staff to fail: when many courses' assignments are now included on a 'feedback tracker' that assigns pass/fail scores (anecdotally, exclusive of mitigating circumstances including illness), it feels as if this decision deliberately creates a higher number of staff deemed to have 'failed' to meet turnaround times, potentially ear-marking those staff and their departments for 're-allocation' or redundancy.
These policy changes also directly affect student experience and learning. The reduction of GH staff support translates to fewer tutors teaching tutorials. The same convenor has shared that with the recently announced budget cuts, it is highly likely that there will be a reduction of the already inadequate GH staff support for their large pre-hons course, which will mean that they and their other full-time colleague will also have to take on additional teaching work of up to six hours per fortnight, despite their current Work-Allocation-Models (WAM) already exceeding 100% allocation. Moreover, in more than one reported case, earlier budget cuts have already led to a reduction in the frequency of tutorials from once-weekly to once-fortnightly, which means less contact time for students.
The fact of the matter is, work in higher education has not decreased. Student numbers are not dropping. Income has not fallen. University Management has managed to manufacture a crisis where there is a steady supply of work, while also ensuring that there are fewer and fewer people to do that work by refusing to hire more staff and reducing department sizes. This is surely to its own detriment, as students, now treated as customers, are not getting the quality of education that they reasonably expect or deserve.
Image Credit
« Le Chat déambule », exposition de 20 sculptures monumentales de Philippe Geluck, sur le quai Wilson à Genève en 2022. By MHM55 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116731601
