Date: Thursday 21 November 2019 for immediate release. Members of the University and College Union at 60 UK universities will walk out from Monday (25 November) to Wednesday 4 December. Disputes are over pay and working conditions, and rising pension costs.
The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University will be hit with eight days of strike action from Monday (25 November) after no agreement could be reached between university representatives and the University and College Union (UCU) over pensions, pay and working conditions.
Striking staff will be on picket lines at all entrances to the University of Sheffield from 8am, including Firth Court, the Hicks Building and Jessop West. At Sheffield Hallam, staff will be on picket lines in the city centre including the Owen Building and entrances on Charles Street, as well as outside Collegiate Hall at the Collegiate Campus on Ecclesall Road.
On Thursday (28 November) striking staff will make their way to a 12pm rally in Barkers Pool where speakers will include UCU general secretary Jo Grady.
UCU members at Sheffield Hallam are in a different pension scheme and were balloted for strikes over increasing workloads. Three-quarters (76%) of members polled backed strikes. Staff at Sheffield Hallam are also taking action on a local dispute about changes to how work is allocated, which has seen some members’ workloads increase by as much as 15%.
UCU members at both institutions will take eight days’ action from 25 November and begin “action short of a strike”. This involves things like working strictly to contract, not covering for absent colleagues and refusing to reschedule lectures lost to strike action.
UCU regional official Julie Kelley said: ‘Strike action is a last resort, but universities’ refusal to deal with these key issues have left us with no alternative. It is staggering and insulting that universities have not done more to work with us to try and find a way to resolve these disputes.
‘We hope students will continue to put pressure on university vice-chancellors to get their representatives back round the negotiating table for serious talks with the union.’
UCU has called 8 days of strike action, starting on the 25th of November and continuing through the 4th of December. While Sheffield UCU committee remains hopeful that Universities UK (who represent the employers on USS) and UCEA (who represent the employers on pay) will return to meaningful negotiations, we will be locally preparing for industrial action in the event that they do not.
Our students are standing with us. The National Union of Students has declared their support, and last week, our local Student’s Union Council voted to support our strike action.
We have put together a Sheffield UCU industrial action document, which should hopefully answer many of your questions, and a specific set of guidance for GTAs and PGRs. We will continue to update these documents as and when we get more information, and will let you know when we do.
How can you get involved? We need your help! There is a trade union adage about the power of collective action: “The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike.” This sentiment applies before the start of the strike as well–the more visible we are collectively, the more we show our employer that we demand real, substantive change in our sector. See our Guidance Document for more ideas of how you can get involved, but for a start, we have three upcoming meetings before the start of industrial action.
Pre-Strike Roadshows: In addition to any department meetings your SUCU departmental rep might be organising, we are holding two ‘Roadshows’ aimed at addressing concerns and queries from staff and students, members and non-members on what the strike action will involve
Monday, 18 November 1-2 Dainton LT1
Friday, 22 November 1-2 Alfred Denny LT2
SUCU branch General Meeting: In addition to discussing any updates on the imminent industrial action, there are several important motions that have been tabled by our members. Please attend, and bring a colleague! Our agenda is attached.
Thursday, 21 November 1-2 Council Room Firth Court
Following concerns being raised by UCU, and negotiations between representatives of the University and the Sheffield UCU branch, a revised position on the use of casual engagements for those undertaking teaching has been agreed by the University Executive Board. Following negotiations with the University, it was agreed that all regular scheduled teaching would be undertaken by staff on an employment contract, making this the default position across the University. This led to the creation of a new GTA contract and the agreement that casual worker agreements can only be used if the work is genuinely of a short term or ad hoc nature (e.g. professional practitioners enhancing learning and teaching or one-off guest lectures).
This signals positive progress on our campaign to end casualisation in our sector. Although the fight is far from over, having won GTA contracts at Grade 6 and Grade 7 means that there will be more security for GTAs across the university. This includes access to the same rights as other employees across the university including holiday pay, sick pay and The Deal scheme.
Whilst the changes above mean that Sheffield UCU is able to close its claim from 2017 on casual teaching, tackling casual working and precarity of employment remains a key element of UCU’s national HE campaigns and the fight at Sheffield is far from over. We still have a long way to go both in terms of recognising the level of work undertaken by GTAs and the precarity that casualised colleagues face.
Alongside our campaigning at a national level, over the coming year, we hope to improve pay and conditions for colleagues across the university. Using the new Grade 7 GTA contract, we aim to encourage departments to remunerate the hard work undertaken by GTAs by reviewing their pay grades. We also hope to develop a best practice guide for GTA employment across the university and work to recruit UCU ‘casuals’ reps to alongside existing departmental reps.
If you’re keen to get involved in the campaign to end casualisation at Sheffield or need advice and support, do get in touch with the branch.
Last spring, Sheffield UCU passed a motion calling for a review of UCU’s democratic structures that we then submitted to Congress, UCU’s annual policy meeting. You can read more about the history of the motion here and in the delegates’ report from Congress 2018 here.
Since the motion was passed at Congress last May, the Democracy Commission has been at work, organising itself around five working groups covering a wide range of UCU’s activities. The initial report of the Democracy Commission will be presented at this year’s Congress (25th-27th May).
You can read the full interim report here, but in short, the recommendations are focused on accountability and transparency in UCU’s structures and senior roles. There are recommendations relating to the following:
1. recall of the General Secretary
2. delegation of some of the General Secretary’s duties to elected officers in the event of their absence
3. changes to how members can view policy
4. changes to how NEC members can submit papers to NEC meetings
5. the possibility of elected deputy General Secretary roles
6. dispute committees made up of branch delegates should be convened for all multi-institution disputes.
All of the recommendations represent changes that increase the ability of members to influence the direction and work of the union.
The interim report of the Democracy Commission will be voted on at Congress by the delegates present and we urge all members to ask their branch delegates to vote in favour of the report and the ongoing work of the Commission. Should this be accepted by Congress, there will be a further Special Congress in the autumn of 2019 to consider the final report of the Commission and we hope that branches will send representatives to that meeting.
Here at Sheffield, we held an action group to discuss this and other motions that are on the agenda for Congress, as well as the ongoing General Secretary election. We continue to do all we can to try to make UCU’s sometimes non-transparent processes clearer to members. If you have any questions about anything to do with the Democracy Commission, Congress, or the national elections held within UCU, please do get in touch.
We will be updating after Congress at our AGM on Thursday June 6th at 1pm in the Council Room at Firth Court – we look forward to seeing you there, and at our end of year party at the Showroom on Friday 14th June (book your ticket here).
University management has been consulting on the development of its Academic Career Pathways for some time. The new promotion pathways came into effect from the start of the 2018-19 academic year, and will be used for promotions for the first time in 2019.
Sheffield UCU has been broadly in favour of changes to academic promotion criteria and procedures that increase transparency around the expectations at each grade, that provide clear pathways for those on teaching-specialist and research-specialist contracts, and that ensure that there are ways for colleagues to move between different pathways.
However, when the detailed expectations for performance at each level were released last summer, we were surprised and disappointed that the University had prioritised student evaluations as the primary (and required) means of evidencing high quality teaching.
There is extensive evidence that student evaluations do not measure teaching quality, and that they are biased on the basis of personal characteristics of the instructor – including gender and race. The feedback we received from members about the inclusion of this metric in the new career pathways was overwhelmingly negative. We therefore presented a briefing paper to members of the University’s senior management, briefly outlining the extensive academic research on these issues, and identifying the implications of that research for the formulation and implementation of student evaluations, and for the use of student evaluations in employment decisions such as promotion. You can access the latest version of our briefing paper, compiled by SUCU committee member Simon Stevens, here: ‘Academic Career Pathways and Student Evaluations of Teaching.’
As a university, we argued, Sheffield should adopt policies that are evidence- and research-based and that reflect international best practice. In assessing teaching quality for the purpose of promotion, the University should not require the use of a metric that is known to be flawed. And the University should adopt policies that promote good teaching, rather than policies – such as prioritising of student ratings in promotion decisions – that have a negative impact on teaching quality.
We are pleased that, as a result of the meeting at which we discussed our briefing paper with representatives of senior management, the University has agreed to remove the primacy of student evaluations from the Academic Career Pathways. In the revised expectations document, ‘consistently excellent student feedback’ is now listed only as one of a number of possible (and not required) forms of evidence that staff could choose to use to demonstrate that they have met the teaching criteria for promotion.
We understand that the University will be reviewing its formulation and implementation of student evaluations later this year, and we hope that that the University will take this opportunity to implement our other recommendations on this issue, especially regarding the kinds of questions in student evaluation questionnaires that invite biased responses.
We have also been concerned to hear from members that this semester the University has implemented a new policy that requires module leads to produce a plan of action if any question in the student evaluations of their module receives a ‘satisfaction score’ of less than 75%. We share the deep concern that many members have expressed about this policy, which creates an additional, punitive burden for staff on the basis of a metric that does not measure teaching quality. This additional workload burden is more likely to fall on those against whom student evaluations are known to be biased, including female instructors and BAME instructors. And, as we argue in our briefing paper, policies that prioritise student evaluation ratings in this way have a negative impact on teaching quality: instructors are incentivised to devote their attention and energy to approaches that correlate with improved student ratings but that are unrelated to (and may even have a negative impact upon) improved student learning.
We are surprised that the University has agreed to alter the academic career pathways criteria in light of the evidence on the limitations and biases of student evaluations of teaching, and yet has simultaneously implemented a burdensome new policy that ignores those limitations and biases. We hope this policy will be quickly abandoned.
We will continue to work on this issue, and will be convening an action group on the University’s use of student evaluations and other metrics on Wednesday 1 May, 1-2pm in Hicks F30: please come along to discuss our branch response to these issues.