Redundancy 2025

[Cartwrightandson]

How is your institution doing? I recall last year there was a lot of redundancies and VS...

@BeAzureAnt I come from a family with a strong union involvement and I am a supporter of unions. But in general UCU are useless and the branch at my institution is particularly poor. The only emails they send out are about how awful it is that women try to have women only groups.

They have their pet causes: ‘the four [incompatible] fights’ and gender identity politics and nothing else seems to be all that important to them 🤷🏻‍♀️

Agree. Even on the Discord channel (where there are threads about this, that and everything) the "budgets cuts" has had about 1 entry since the VS was added, and nothing from the Union leaders. The Union should be finding out what is happening behind the scenes for us, and helping us understand what % of staff the University is aiming to cut (and from which groups).

plus divisive positions on various International situations (with limited or no relevance to UK HE).

Absolutely. And the SMT say they don't know how much money VS needs to save - which means they are lying or incompetent.

Come on, be fair. Have you not seen the "Ceasefire Now!" posters everywhere around your institution? I'm sure UCU was instrumental in getting Israel and Hamas to current discussions.

I’m sorry that your branch was disappointing. Ours actually made some headway about workloading models. I decided to work with what I had and did my best to help my colleagues as I could. Some of their continuing development classes are reasonably OK, and I used their will writing service which saved me some money (I recommend looking into it). But of course, your experiences may vary.

Well, it is good in any case there is a ceasefire.

Our email from people services hinted that restructuring means an end to unfunded research time. So, get those grants or teach, basically.

So they won't be expecting people to produce anything for the REF?

Unclear! Although, suspect most ref-able outputs do come from funded projects (in my field anyway). Taking away contracted research time in favour of teaching would be a huge blow to those on teaching and research contracts. It's not like anyone can just dash off a grant in a free afternoon either...

I think you are right. I feel pretty grim about it. Most of my published work has been done in that time. I wrote a grant this year, but it nearly broke me to do it because of teaching demands. We are having another round of VS but I am in my 50s and qualified into a corner...

Have they taken into account that some grant schemes only have a 10 percent success rate? Grants,like international Chinese students, are not panaceas to the HE crisis.

I'm in one of the newer small institutes, we have had a decade of this sort of thing.

Everyone is just weary. The best academics and most research academics leave so our REF & KEF will be interesting...

Obviously some great academics have stayed, they don't want to relocate etc.

Hardly any of the research outputs in my department are funded by grants. They're mainly funded by people working overtime and not taking their annual leave.

@GCAcademic absolutely this.

Plus everything that is grant funded has a £ cost to the uni as the ones at 100% are so very few and far between.

Exactly this. I feel so despondent about it.

We've been given a whole list of funders / schemes we're no longer allowed to apply to because of this.

At my institution they are restructuring all the undergraduate and postgraduate supporting PS roles, and to the surprise of the faculty who are running the review, instead of applying for the new centralised roles as they were expected to do (and possibly supposed to be grateful for) a number of the PS staff are opting for redundancy instead. As a lot of them have been in their jobs for 10+ years are are over 40, they will be getting excellent payouts as the university offers an enhanced redundancy package - good for them I say!

@Borland I wish my university were offering an excellent package. It's absolutely rubbish

I read on the UCU Commons blog that UCEA has pulled out of the four fights negotiations (something to do with something UNISON has done). This seems like a big deal and I can’t believe more hasn’t been said about it. The other thing I read is there’s going to be a ballot for industrial action to take place before Easter. Isn’t the timing getting a bit tight for this? Easter’s only ten weeks away.

And @Borland there is a lot of talk at my university about how redundancies should all be PS as there are too many of us 😢needless to say it is academic staff who are saying that. I don't know what they think we do, or who does all the stuff they don't want to do!

Yes the hacking of PS especially grade 6 & below and then the academics spending there time doing admin that many have no clue how to do not the time to do it.