Redundancies at your university?

[Oh2beatsea]

Are any of you working at one of the many universities that are struggling financially?
Our university announced the financial pressure it's under recently and they are now talking about redundancies. I know a few in the sector are in a similar position and wondered what stage you might be at and how has the process been managed? Have they offered voluntary redundancy first or have they gone straight to compulsory redundancies?
Unsettling times.

My husband has just been made redundant. He took VS but the terms were dismal, no better (and in some ways worse) than statutory redundancy pay. They were counting on people not wanting to stay because the departments in question would be so decimated that their teaching hours would be doubled. And the senior management were absolutely vile to the staff who were under threat of redundancy. I've heard similar from people at other universities, it seems to be a strategy to make the workplace so unpleasant that people want to leave. It worked in the case of my husband's university, quite a lot of people took the VS, but they're still going to have to make compulsory redundancies.

There's going to be a lot more of this to come, I fear.

Yes, cutbacks at mine. They say that they're hoping to avoid compulsory redundancies. I am not so worried about my own job security but I am concerned about colleagues on fixed term and associate lectures - and then who is going to do all that work. 2 people out of the team of 12 I am in took VS last semester and are not being replaced- at the moment gaps are being plugged with associate lecturers

We went through hell recently. Lost about 40 percent of staff in some departments. Workloads are hugely increased. They still want more to go. Friends have been talking about the 130 announced possible redundancies at Goldsmiths. Things are going from bad to worse in UKHE non RG.

Plate Glass uni here and no talk of redundancies yet. However no posts are being replaced when people leave and there's no budget for casual/GTA staff. We are however encouraged to take as many applicants as possible at the lowest tariffs we can get away with.

Yes, it sounds like a similar picture across-the-board.
It's worrying to think about being made redundant, but also worrying to think of what the workload will be like for those left after the redundancies.

We had already lowered the tariff last year and we have a huge number of students who are really struggling and it's not just from an academic perspective. This in itself increases our workload as we chase students who aren't engaging.
In some ways it would be nice to return to the days where students only come to university because they actually want to study the course that we run, rather than it being that some come for the university experience or because they are not sure what else to do.
Difficult times ahead I think.

We had VS in the Autumn 2023 semester, and those posts were not replaced. We have had to piece together teaching which will lead to a massive decimation of our NSS scores due to the inconsistency and lack of permanent support for students. Uni has just announced the ending of a local authority partnership which severs one of my programmes. I've just moved into a HoD post and I could cry...the pressure to take students who do not meet the entry requirements is insane. It's a prof regulated programme yet they want me to water down the admissions process and 'offer offer offer'. Luckily my team are bloody amazing and we push back at every opportunity and focus on the profession. I feel very out of my depth and I wish I had never accepted the job.

Not heard of redundancies at my uni but there is a pressure (for pgt) to make more offers. I work in income generation and we are recruiting.

A programme has started for VS where I work (non RG). The rumours seem to be its targeted at the higher paid, close to retirement academics. Who knows if that is true or not. Its going to be an interesting and scary few months for us all.

VS at mine last semester & up to now. Some big names have gone with only a couple of weeks notice. Restructure to follow now with fewer posts available

RG here, voluntary redundancies will start next month. HE funding is a mess, the university is doing its best (IMO) under really difficult circumstances. It's horrible for everyone involved, staff and students, but there's no political will to increase funding into universities so it's inevitable!

It will be even worse for smaller, or newer or teaching intensive universities.

Concerned parent here. I'm wondering what the impact is on the student at your universities?

My child will hopefully be going to Uni in September & he needs to firm up his choices. One of his offers is from a uni that is in a bad way financially, there is talk of closing departments & redundancies (not in his subject). This makes me very nervous.

Any suggestions of questions I can ask to understand what the impact could be?

The risk of your child's course being closed will be very university and course specific. Module choice may reduce. The UK still has outstanding universities, but resources are very squeezed. The erosion of maintenance loans and general CoL crisis is equally significant.

We had a round of VS a couple of years ago, very targeted and specific with a view to closing courses & modules that weren't viable and amalgamating duplicate courses. Terms were favourable and people who wanted to go tended to get VS. It was unsettling because we had 2 years of the rumour mill and lots of talk about excellence etc. so morale was awful and it's not really recovered yet.

@kateandsam

I left HE sector about 2 years ago. Not a lecturer but worked in a student support role. In my Uni student support services were being decimated. (Eg academic support for students with disabilities, Student counselling services, dept admin teams were all being cut - which meant student queries such as academic appeals etc were piling up. The staff that were still there exhausted and overworked. Basically the quality of student experience was going through the floor.

Pretty much all Unis are struggling financially to some extent, but some are definitely worse than others and I fully expect that some will be bankrupt in next five years. Would advise reviewing the financial position of your child's chosen institutions carefully.

Yes. I was made redundant without warning (or redundancy pay!) along with about 100 of us at my previous university and current colleagues have had redundancy letters.

It would take a forensic accountant to understand the immediate risk to a specific university from their most recent annual accounts. As a rule of thumb, universities which are smaller, newer, lower tariff, with a lower proportion of international students are more vulnerable financially. But a recent PWC report showed that 40% of universities in the uk are likely to report a deficit this year. That rises to 60% if international student recruitment tanks even further.

Courses that have fewer students overall in places with small or declining market share of this group are at risk
Also think about the specificity of your course within the wider discipline. In the worst case scenario and the course gets closed while they are there -having lots of people around who could still teach on it will make the impact on your dc minimal
So even if they close jh history and politics it won't make a difference because history and politics will still be around

Where can we find info on which universities are financially struggling

Short answer, every university in the uk is struggling.

Those with large endowments will be the most resilient for the longest.

Our admissions have been up this year (almost back to pre Covid levels and more than national average).

But when you're making a loss on every home UG student you recruit this is not always good news...!

This is from last year (doubtless there'll be a similar item next month once the data is released).

Look at the 'surplus/deficit as % income' - loads in deficit.

https://wonkhe.com/blogs/hesa-spring-2023-financial-data/

Neither my former nor current workplaces are doing badly on those links which just goes to show, you can't necessarily tell.

In terms of advice for prospective students...on the ground what I am seeing is that it's Humanities, Arts, Languages and "niche" subjects that are doing badly and in danger of being axed. So Creative Writing went entirely at my old workplace, for example, English is all but out the window there and Film, Music, Drama, Journalism, Media, PE,
Dance etc all doing badly or axed altogether. Medicine, Nursing, Allied Healthcare, Dentistry, Opthalmics, Physio etc all doing really well and in no danger. Traditional "taught"
PGCE and Education degrees are struggling to recruit. STEM and business doing well. Anything that attracts international students is doing well. Massive investment in Chinese, Indian and Arab recruitment.

In terms of the courses themselves if a DC is already enrolled and in year 1 or 2...they tend to get phased out and go down to a skeleton staff and some modules get shared with other courses. Some of this can be quite random...(ie Arts/Humanities students having to study a language or education double module whether they like it or not!). So for existing students, the courses get "taught out" and no further recruitment takes place...staff with a strong specialism and who also currently work in the field alongside lecturing (like me )get made redundant as courses become more "general" with only the very basics of the subjects taught and there are far less options for module selection or to indulge areas of interest.

Unless it's a course that leads to professional registration/guaranteed job (such as dentistry, nursing etc), I've stopped recommending university to loved ones as it feels morally wrong with the inside knowledge I have now.

I get that medical courses are full in terms of recruitment, but our data from our uni shows that in social sciences, we subsidised the medical school and many STEM subjects in terms of grants, and also medical students are expensive to keep. There is a belief that STEM and medicine are always income generators and this just isn't borne out by our data, or rather if you look at the average income generation of one of the social science staff vs the other staff (except humanities) then we come out better!

We are about 30% overseas.