Lecturers' leaders fear universities are heaping extra work on already overstretched staff in a bid to tackle high numbers of student dropouts.
The concerns voiced by lecturers' union Natfhe came as documents leaked to The Times Higher reveal that staff at Cardiff University's School of Social Sciences have been given big increases in their teaching loads to counter an "unacceptable" student dropout rate of 18 per cent.
Roger Kline, head of the universities department at Natfhe, was unable to comment on Cardiff specifically but said: "Our research has shown that teaching workloads continue to rise. And overworked lecturers are one of the main causes of high student dropout. Increasing workloads further will make the dropout rate worse, as staff morale plummets and students get more cheesed off," he said. "You tackle dropouts by hiring more staff and providing more support, not by stretching people further."
At Cardiff, a memo to 130 staff outlining teaching and supervision duties for 2005-06 from Huw Benyon, the school director, says that the school "falls down badly" when it comes to keeping undergraduate students on courses.
"For the past two sessions, 18 per cent of our intake has not progressed to the second year. This is unacceptable," he says.
Professor Benyon adds that the evidence from student "exit forms" suggests that poor tutorial support is a major contributory cause of non-completion.
One of the solutions imposed at Cardiff is to make lecturers spend more time teaching first-years. "Given the haemorrhaging of students from the first year, staff have been allocated seminar duties on these courses," Professor Benyon says. "This is essential if we are to improve the quality of teaching and ensure we are more in touch with the experiences of students in their first year."
To create "space" in academics' timetables, the university is reducing the number of notional hours allocated for the supervision of PhD students.
This means that staff will have to do more undergraduate teaching to reach their total annual teaching workload of 150 hours.
Professor Benyon has also asked staff to start giving lectures outside their strict area of expertise. He said: "The school makes strong claims for the interdisciplinary nature of its activities. This implies that members of each of the disciplines active in the school should be involved in its more generic modules. This is seen to be pedagogically sound (preventing courses 'belonging' to one person or one particular viewpoint)."
Staff held an emergency meeting about the changes with Professor Benyon last week, but the local branch of the Association of University Teachers declined to comment. Chris Yewlett, spokesman for the branch, said:
"There's nothing to talk about. Yet."
The university added that it supported Professor Benyon's initiatives to improve undergraduate teaching.