Universities must do more to end “endemic casualisation” among research-only staff in the UK, according to a report that finds measures such as redeployment, “bridging” funding and enhanced redundancy pay are used only sporadically across the sector.
The University and College Union (UCU) has published a league table ranking the institutions that it says are doing the most to tackle insecure employment, based on Freedom of Information requests the union sent to all institutions that employ research-only staff.
With a score of 64 out of 100, the University of Leeds was judged to be the doing the most, in part because it offers a higher rate of redundancy pay to departing fixed-term staff, ranging from four months’ net pay for those with four years’ service to 12 months’ pay to those who have been with the institution for more than eight years.
Alongside Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University, Leeds was just one of three institutions that UCU found offered “significantly more” redundancy pay than the statutory minimum, which it said could be both a financial cushion for staff to find alternative work and an incentive to employers to explore alternatives to dismissal.
Other factors that contributed to institutions’ scores included the percentage of staff successfully redeployed at the end of a contract, whether “bridging” funding was offered to allow research-only staff to maintain employment between externally funded projects and whether or not there were other ongoing efforts to improve the security of employment of research staff.
UCU said a third of the universities it contacted were unable to say whether research staff had been redeployed because they did not keep track of such information. Of the ones that did respond, redeployment levels ranged from zero to 80 per cent.
Just eight institutions scored above 50 overall, with the universities of Aberdeen, Lancaster and York judged to be among the better performers, alongside Ulster and Cranfield universities, UCL and Queen’s University Belfast.
Institutions with a high proportion of staff on fixed-term contracts scored lower. SOAS University of London was ranked bottom, with a score of 13 out of 100.
Citing Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa) figures from 2021-22, the UCU report highlights that 95 per cent of Soas’ 50 research-only staff at the time were on fixed-term contracts, compared with 88 per cent at the University of Oxford and 96 per cent at both King’s College London and the London School of Economics.
Oxford said it was “aware of staff’s concerns about the use of fixed-term contracts in some areas, particularly those supported by short-term sources of external funding” and it was currently conducting a review of university pay and conditions.
Overall, 66 per cent of research-only staff in UK universities were employed on fixed-term contracts, a figure UCU says “has changed little in the last decade”.
“This report shines a light on an area that universities would rather keep shrouded in darkness; namely, the widespread use of gig-economy style short-term contracts for the staff who prop up university research departments,” said Jo Grady, UCU’s general secretary.
“The poor scores across the board on areas like fixed-term contracts, proper redeployment processes and decent redundancy provision speak of a sector that urgently needs to update its attitudes to employment practices. Critically, the worst practices are not confined, as one might expect, to the least financially secure institutions. Far from it: five of the 24 Russell Group universities are in the bottom half of the table.”
Dr Grady said the funding model for UK research “allows employers to blame the system for their choice of employment practices”, but the differences in approaches showed that it was a “choice” many universities were making, and not a necessity, she argued.
Raj Jethwa, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association, said institutions “use small numbers of flexible contracts for research staff, which are usually linked to external funding awards. The employment arrangements within autonomous universities are for institutional-level discussions.”
Hesa figures released on 30 January showed that the percentage of academic staff on permanent contracts across the sector as a whole has risen in the past year, from 67 per cent in 2021-22 to 70 per cent in 2022-23, he added.
