If education secretary Charles Clarke and vice-chancellors are serious about enhancing learning and teaching, they need to reform restrictive personnel policies regarding academic-related staff.
Administrators will play a key role in the academic teams charged with delivering reforms. Computing and library staff will be essential to their implementation. However, promotion to senior-lecturer-equivalent grades is often on the basis of management position rather than professional contribution to academic teams.
The ILTHE failed to identify our contribution to enhancing teaching and learning. Any new academy should, in offering full membership, make clear our team role in delivering change.
Peter Rees Jones
Chair, National Administrative Staff Committee
Association of University Teachers