End of Year Message: We can build a better University

In this end-of-year mailing, we consider the current position of our University, how we have got here, and what needs to change to ensure that in 2025 brings about a positive future for staff and students.

The University of Brighton has been mismanaged for several years. The arrival in early 2025 of a new Vice Chancellor, an external candidate, offers the opportunity for an essential reset.

We all know that the University sector in the UK is in crisis. While this crisis is ultimately the long tail of a failing experiment in the marketisation of higher education, the proximate cause of the current crisis is a combination of high inflation, frozen fees and falling student numbers, both domestic and international.

Although student recruitment is down across the sector, the University of Brighton’s recruitment has fallen by 15% this year, a sharper decline than any of its self-identified competitors and comparators. And despite years of relentless pressure and management initiatives aimed at improving NSS metrics, the University of Brighton’s NSS scores for teaching and learning and student experience are poor, especially compared to so-called competitors. There is also evidence to suggest that both TEF and REF metrics will worsen.

Strategy

The institutional strategy that has been followed for many years has failed.

The mass redundancies in 2023 were a symptom of this failed strategy which prioritised cuts over all else. This same strategy involved the closure of two entire campuses, and the culling of vast numbers of modules and courses. We are told that we must focus on student recruitment and retention. As courses close all around us, we are left asking ‘recruitment and retention to what?’

Continual cuts to workload hours for our core business – teaching and research – mean that staff are expected to teach and research to the highest standards, without the resources required to make this possible. Student recruitment and retention is dependent on high quality teaching. High quality teaching is dependent on having the time to research one’s subject area and to prepare, plan and continually update teaching.

The University claims that cuts are a financial necessity. But the choice of where and how to make cuts is a strategic one. Management roles have actually expanded while resourcing for teaching and research has been cut. A strategy which prioritised cuts to the core business of the University was always doomed to fail. It has failed.

We welcome the new VC and a fresh start. Professor Whitehead has already scheduled meetings with the two campus trade unions in February. This is a positive sign that the new VC recognises the need to work positively with the trade unions, who represent all staff at our University. It is no coincidence that the best times for this University were characterised by good industrial relations. We welcome a reset in this regard and are positive about developing good industrial relations once more at this University.

When we meet Professor Whitehead in February, we will be highlighting some of our priorities for our University:

Promotions

If not resolved by then, it is essential that the new VC re-establishes a promotions procedure at our University and makes good the harm caused by the absence of such a procedure since management cancelled it in early 2023.

This would be the first test of the new VC’s willingness to reset industrial relations.

Course Closures

It is staggeringly obvious that continually cutting courses harms student recruitment.

Decisions to close courses appear to be taken with no strategy and with minimal involvement of staff working on these courses. Insultingly misnamed ‘consultation meetings’ are scheduled by Deans or Associate Deans to inform staff that their courses will be closed. When rationales for course closures are provided, these typically offer vague and unevidenced claims about course sustainability or potential student recruitment. At the very least, colleagues who create and run courses – those who actually teach and assess students – should be entitled to a clear and evidence-based explanation for management decisions. In the absence of such explanations or evidence, decisions appear at best myopic and at worse harmful and arbitrary.

It is perhaps more concerning that the University of Brighton seems to have fully embraced a market-driven approach to higher education, one in which the existence of a course or a subject is solely based on marketing-derived predictions about student interest. Courses are not economic units. They are not market offerings, to be discarded when they fail to turn a profit. A university’s mission is to serve the public good, which entails offering a portfolio of courses that reflects the intellectual interests and needs of society and our local communities.

Bad management

The recent move to a hierarchical, chain-of-command management style has failed. The University requires its staff to exercise considerable autonomy, and yet it consistently undermines and erodes this autonomy. Students benefit when staff are able to teach to their expertise and interests. Students benefit when staff are not stressed. Students benefit when staff are not bullied. Bad management is bad for everyone.

The widespread bad management at our institution is also a symptom of a failed strategy from the top. Managerial and leadership roles used to be filled by academics with an interest in collegial working. In recent years, the autonomy of leaders and managers themselves has been removed. They have been re-cast as enforcers of policy, determined by a senior executive team. This approach to management is now outdated and disregarded even in corporate contexts. It is accepted across the board that staff autonomy is beneficial to workplace culture, productivity, wellbeing and more.

Colleagues are consistently informed that the University cares about their wellbeing, about the importance of equality, about their career progression, about the desire to create a thriving and collaborative workplace. But these messages stand in stark contrast to the reality on the ground.

Layers of middle management need to be removed, the non-sensical notion of staff having designated ‘line-managers’ needs to be abolished and autonomy given back to academics. Unless this changes, university managers will continue to harm our students’ experiences, with consequences for NSS scores, recruitment and retention.

Workloads

The role of staff at the University has been both expanded and diminished. While our autonomy and the trust in our professionalism and judgment has been eroded, we are now expected to be managers, administrators, researchers, writers, outreach officers, IT experts, online instructors, pedagogical innovators, student recruiters, teachers and markers, grant bidders and editors, and to ensure that we look after our own wellbeing.

But the one area that ultimately determines our success – whether measured by metrics such as student satisfaction, recruitment, graduate outcomes, or our own understanding of the value of education – is the interaction between staff and students. If any area should be prioritised for support and resource, it is our teaching and associated research.

One obvious solution to many of the ills of the current failed strategy is to refocus academic workloads on academic work. The removal of managerial roles and layers would free up space to allocate more hours to both teaching and research. Rather than roles which exist only to quantify, measure and monitor our work, the University should direct resources to our actual work. The global workload capacity is there – it’s a question of prioritising the types of work that a university should actually be doing.

Summary

We can build a better University, one in which staff are proud to work and where students gain the benefits of an excellent education. But this will take a change of strategy whereby management no longer view staff as the enemy, or a simple resource from which to extract ever greater work, but as colleagues with the solutions to turn the ship around.

The crisis in UK Higher Education is real and it means that there is limited room for manoeuvre. But rather than attacking their staff, University management should be working with us to press the new government to address the crisis.

Get involved

As well as pushing for a new strategic approach across the University, 2025 will see our union branch continue to undertake its essential local work.

Health & Safety and Wellbeing is an on-going priority, in particular with regards to stress.

Anti-casualisation efforts continue, with casework supporting people to be moved onto correct permanent contracts, PhD students (now with free standard membership) joining our branch, and targeted anti-cas worked planned for specific areas in 2025.

Our equalities reps will be working to ensure that the University adheres to its policies on equalities issues.

Our casework team will support members with issues at work.

You can get involved and support your branch. If there is an issue affecting you or your department, please let us know. Contact details for our officers and reps are available here.

 

Warm wishes for the winter break. We look to 2025 with optimism.

UCU University of Brighton branch committee