Joined-up model

The juxtaposition of Paul Whiteley's letter ("Unethical Trac", 18 February) and the article on academic stress ("Stress levels exceed safety parameters") highlight the need for joined-up thinking when academic workloads are determined.

The Transparent Approach to Costing is distrusted due to the way time-allocation data are collected. If the guidelines were changed to encourage the use of workload models, as investigated by the Higher Education Funding Council for England-funded Management of Academic Workloads Network, we would gain a better understanding of our use of resources in human and financial terms, to the benefit of both.

Jon Kerridge, Professor of computing and Trac academic manager, Edinburgh Napier University.