This blog has started as more of a personal reflection, but it may end up as a call to action. We’ll see.

A conversation last week with an administrator from another part of the university (let’s call her Caroline) led me to think a bit about the academic team – students, academic staff, and administrators who participate together in an ongoing project of scholarship. Some colleagues may remember, in the mists of time, when the University had academic teams.  We called them departments. Each department had at least one departmental administrator, who supported the Head of Department in administrative tasks, both teaching- and research-related, helped students navigate the course, and – in many cases – provided the quasi-familial glue that held the department together. As with all roles, some department administrators were more skilful than others, and each had their strengths as well as weaknesses, but they were, by and large, people whose jobs were to be there for the department.

Even further back in the mists of time, academic departments had their own budgets, ran their own activities, and when they needed support for those activities, they went to support teams who pitched up with what was needed, be it technical assistance, teaching innovation, or specialist printing… but I digress.

Now, much has moved on from those halcyon days – our responsibilities to HESA, HEFCE, QAA, and RCUK (and the Borders Agency, and..and..) have expanded beyond all recognition. As the sector shifted inexorably from a resource for public good to a provider of private gain, our University moved with the times. It created a belatedly Thatcherite “internal market” for support services in the late 1990s, and then – disastrously – in the new century “Transitioned” into the form we see now, in which many “departments” are virtual within Academic Units or Faculties; in which – as Caroline pointed out – administrators no longer work directly for academics, but are in structural silos according to responsibilities, line-managed and appraised by someone who may work on an entirely different campus; and in which the student is a consumer (the “student-consumer,” as one upcoming policy event now has it) rather than a participant.

When the conversation turns to the University’s (rather than Faculties’ or Academic Units’) responsibility for NSS, I frequently hear, “well, students talk to each other, so we need to make sure that everyone gets the same level of service.” From a quality assurance point of view, there is certainly a strong case for ensuring procedural equivalence (if not equality) across the University. But Transition began a process that has all but wiped out something irreplaceable to the student experience. Administrators were removed from departments and corralled into open-plan offices – this might have been seen as a more efficient way to work, but it ripped the soul out of our departments, and things have never been the same. Transition, and every successive centralising restructure, first destabilised, then demolished, then in places erased all memory of the academic team.

In many parts of the University, students begin their academic journey in contact with an Admissions Team, their local queries are dealt with at a Faculty/AU Student Office by someone at a hatch or a counter, they rock up to lectures and tutorials where their presence may or may not be recorded (don’t get me started about whether or not attendance can be mandatory, and what that means for student support…), but they do not belong anywhere particular.  Caroline told me last week that she has seen students wandering campus in tears: now that almost all pastoral support has been devolved to academics, who are busier and busier, and thinner and thinner on the ground anyway, it is not unlikely that both their Personal Academic Tutor and the Senior Tutor are teaching or in administrative meetings. Who is there for that student, especially if they are on a joint honours course? With no academic team to belong to, where do they, and where do their tutors, find their community, their tribe, and their support? There are nightlines, advice centre drop-ins, the First Support team – and they do very good work, but there is no substitute for the personal relationships that used to bind our teams together.

My own students (I am both a PAT and Senior Tutor for my AU) are privileged because we may be the one of a very few AUs that still has an administrator who sits in an office in the middle of our campus space – Music is separated from the rest of Humanities at the Avenue, so there has to be a Faculty outpost at Highfield. The students think of the staff in that office as Music staff, even though technically they are not – but in general, those administrators know all our students by name and have an understanding of who they are, what issues they might have, and even – gasp! – might have some sort of friendly rapport with them.

This may seem all very nice but not necessarily germane. However, when it comes to dealing with students (and staff, for that matter) with specific mental health issues, or those that have sudden personal crises, and even those that just want to share something wonderful that has happened to them, that relationship can make all the difference. The day before my conversation with Caroline, a student in deep crisis felt able to come to our administrator, who then was able to provide some initial comfort and guidance before coming to find me and the PAT. I cannot imagine that student feeling comfortable going to a counter or a hatch, in floods of tears, in order to talk to a complete, or nearly complete stranger. But as it was, they had immediate and personal support, and within minutes they were safely in an office where they could cry until they were able to express the problem, and by the end of the day we were on our way to identifying solutions.

That student is in the third year, and will be filling out the NSS in a matter of months. I wonder if we did a quick analysis around the University, whether we would find lower NSS scores overall in places where the academic team is most fragmented or even non-existent? Where it is impossible to place a sign saying “Welcome to the Department of X-ology” because such a place is only virtual? Where the students would not be able to name or recognise the person responsible for administering their academic progress, or vice versa?

When you think of the student as a consumer rather than a participant, your perception of their needs and wants is changed. I rather suspect the University thinks its responsibility to the NSS is to provide a better student experience through administrative efficiency, because it is measurable. In order to find answers about administrative effectiveness, our senior management have been putting their faith in an opaque consultancy process called Uniforum, the results of which have been impossible to obtain (commercially sensitive, don’t you know?).  When we ask for data – because we care about our students and our colleagues, and because we want some agency in the future of the university – we are rebuffed. But when we tell them things (because our experience should be of value), via whatever consultation or staff engagement mechanism they care to dream up, they have not yet listened.

The big question is, of course, is there a will or a way of turning back the clock? Or can we do it in a move forward, rather than a move back? If this is a moment of great change in the university, why should we not take the opportunity to make it as positive a change as possible? What do you think? Would the re-establishment and repair of fractured academic teams make a difference? To the student experience? To the staff that bear the the day-to-day responsibility for making the student experience better?

The Penguins of Solidarity rally around our community

This week Southampton UCU reps have been working with colleagues in the latest Faculty to be hit by a restructuring programme – or as it is rather euphemistically described in briefing papers, ‘Realigning resource to meet the decline in student numbers’. (SUCU believe that a genuine ‘people strategy’ would refrain from labelling people – our friends and colleagues – as resources, but we are where we are).

This announcement has been preceded by a preliminary consultation period.  SUCU representatives have repeatedly reviewed the draft consultation materials, scrutinising the equality impact assessment and working with HR to reduce the number of ‘resource units’ (i.e. colleagues) at risk. These negotiations are informing our own plans for how best the branch can support staff. This is becoming the bread-and-butter, everyday work of our branch, as successive restructures and redundancies are announced. We are (mostly) a volunteer force, but thankfully we also have the support of our regional officials and the back-up of the national teams.

At the staff meeting called to open this particular consultation, the Vice-Chancellor explained that the University’s apparently sizeable surplus in its accounts was really an operating surplus of only £3m on a turnover of £600m. He said that despite the austerity measures, notably the recruitment freeze, staff numbers have risen more quickly than the numbers of students and this will necessitate further restructuring. This will not be happy news for staff who have been threatened with redundancy in cross-University ‘Transition’ and ‘In-Ex’, and other localised restructuring schemes over recent years. And let us not forget the 250 or so staff who appear on the fixed term redundancy notification every 3 months, for whom fear of losing their job is a hardwired expectation.

Job insecurity is becoming a way of life across the university.  That said, it is worth noting that once again the proposed job reductions involve frontline staff – this time it is academics, while previous restructures have targeted administrative and support staff. Yet the elephant in the room is the apparently inexorable rise in higher earners (those earning over £100k) employed here over recent years, who are seldom ever in the frame for redundancies.

Another interesting reveal in the consultation process was that Sir Christopher’s summer reading of the NSS data identified evidence of tactical voting in at least one subject area. Subsequently it has emerged that this was in part due to the efforts of one disgruntled individual with a sizable Facebook network mobilising a protest vote. This is, of course, appalling, but we have yet to see any of our sector leaders seriously challenge the NSS methodology, and highlight the obvious problems of manipulation.

Led by the National Union of Students, students in other institutions boycotted the NSS precisely because it is a problematic measure and because it was reportedly to be used to enable fee increases by the ‘best’ (TEF-Gold rated) institutions. We share the NUS’s concerns, and we would like to see that our leaders do, too. We want them to set out a vision of education as transformative, life changing and necessarily challenging – not to use the questionable results of a survey based on the ‘student as consumer’ model as yet another performance management metric to browbeat individuals and teams.

We recognise that there is always room for improvement, but this improvement cannot happen in a vacuum, and will not happen if we carry on in a culture of fear.  Instead of telling us just to do ‘simply better’, we suggest that the University return to providing meaningful staff development and support: the closure of our learning and teaching unit – ILIaD – earlier this year has left a significant gap in provision for staff looking to improve their skills.

Sadly, we expect to see much more of this sort of activity across the University in the coming weeks.  We urge you to urge your colleagues: join the union, get active, get informed, and feel empowered.  We still have Senate, we still have our Statutes and Ordinances, and we must fight to preserve them.  No one is saying that the next few months are going to be easy, but they will be less distressing if we work together with a common purpose.

A long title, sure, but this issue lies at the root of many of the intractable problems that are having a most severe effect on our members.  We want our members, both ERE and MSA staff, to recognise that we can improve both student and staff experience without succumbing to the rhetoric and false logics of the marketisation of higher education (our strategy Simply Better, as we have now been told, has its roots in a “radically conservative” self-help marketing book by the same title).

This blog covers only the aspects that we addressed at the UCU JNC on 12 October 2017, but we are very happy to continue the conversation offline, and welcome members’ contributions. We would particularly encourage members who are on Senate to consider how they can help reframe the conversation within the university governance structure.

Module evaluation

There are so many things wrong with the ways student evaluation is used and interpreted, across the sector and in our own institution.  While it is important to have a means of informing module enhancement and tools for examining student experience, end-of-semester module evaluation questionnaires are, at best (even when they are conducted and interpreted appropriately), limited in the benefit they can impart, particularly that the students themselves can experience. We have created an initial resource for members’ use, centred on mid-module evaluation – already practice in some faculties – as a much more constructive way to engage students in effective change: click here to see our suggestions for Module Evaluations and Simply Better.

There is a weighty, constantly evolving literature that shows “student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related,” that “teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with students’ evaluations,” and worse, that unconscious gender bias affects “even putatively objective aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded” to a statistically significant degree. Our submission to the October JNC was unequivocal about this bias, and we consider the discussion to have put the University on notice. Management cannot now claim that they are unaware that student module evaluation questionnaires bear a significant and demonstrable burden of discrimination in contravention of the Equality Act, and  SUCU will support any member of staff wishing to commence a grievance who can show that their module evaluation scores have been used in a way that causes them to suffer detriment (see also the upcoming blog on our Appraisal discussion).

Timetabling policy

At the October JNC, we also addressed some serious issues with the Timetabling Policy:  currently, although it ostensibly allows for reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act, it contains a hierarchy of protected characteristics and who has those characteristics, student or staff – which rather confounds the concept of equality.  It also jeopardises the University’s Athena Swan award, so we want this fixed sooner rather than later: we have asked that the policy be considered as a matter of urgency at Policy Review.  We are also deeply concerned that some members with protected characteristics are being refused flexible working/timetabling requests, and we are pursuing this with the Equalities Officer as a matter of priority.

The conversation then turned to that aspect of the policy that has created disaffection and distress in the whole community: the fundamental principle (3.12.a) that student choice determines the timetable, not the other way around. We all know the havoc this manifests at the beginning of each semester, and it is not uncommon to find that we do not know where we are teaching, even days (or working hours) before the beginning of the semester, or that for a week or two (or more) the class size can be greater than the number of students a room can accommodate.   But it has ramifications further into the semester: for instance, if your module assessment design is based on an average intake of a certain number of students and you find you have double or half that number registered, all sorts of problems arise at the point of assessment (inadequate time for presentations, inadequate numbers for effective group work etc.).

This is not something on which the union is empowered to negotiate directly, but we can hold a view and we can represent our members’ views to the JNC.  We know that timetabling problems and mismatches between module design and module enrolment, issues wholly or largely out of the control of individual departments, have directly contributed to poor outcomes on NSS. We strongly assert that academic staff should not be held accountable, through measures taken via the Education Strategy, for problems created by a misguided adherence to the notion that student module choice trumps all other considerations.  Given an appropriate and meaningful choice, students – as far as we can tell – would opt for modules and courses to run smoothly and predictably: perhaps less variety overall, but with more timetabled options for popular/core modules.

Students are not customers, and strategies to address customer satisfaction (as if we were the book Simply Better‘s illustrative businesses Toyota, Tesco, and Ryanair) are not the first place we should be looking to improve the “quality of education and student experience“ we provide.  If senior management wants to know where the stresses are that make the real differences, then all they have to do is ask, listen, and accept – even if the message is not one they particularly want to hear. The Collegiality strand of Southampton’s Simply Better demands “high-performing leadership and management” and a “community built on trust and taking personal accountability.”

Go on, then. Let’s talk, and put it right – for all of us.