Part-timers lose most jobs

Nearly 10,000 further education lecturers have been or are to be made redundant, according to figures released by Natfhe, the university and college lecturers' union today.

Part-timers have borne the brunt of the redundancies. More than 4,500 have been made redundant and a further 3,000 are projected to go, with three regions being particularly affected.

This compares with more than l,300 existing and 363 projected redundancies for full-timers involving some who were on fixed-term contracts Natfhe says that some of the redundancies are technical and many part-timers will probably be re-employed by the same institutions.

Information compiled by the union's regions shows that the main reasons for the redundancies are very large cuts, shortfalls or deficits in institutional budgets, cuts in allocations from the Further Education Funding Council, lack of students, and failure to meet student targets.

Deficits go as high as Pounds 3.2 million at City of Liverpool Community College which has shed 100 jobs. Sheffield, which has a Pounds 1.9 million deficit because of loss of income from all sources, has made 120 redundancies.

Paula Lanning, assistant secretary of Natfhe, said that one of the main factors behind redundancies was inadequate funding to meet expansion targets.

"The other point is that the funding formula is wrong because it is based on a common unit and does not respond to the different needs of different institutions, nor does it take into account the college's capacity to expand."

While full-time redundancies are spread throughout the regions, part-time job losses have been concentrated in two of their regions - northern with more than 2,000, 448 of which are at Newcastle College, and the north-west region with nearly 1,500, with 853 at Bradford and Ilkley.

The highest number of full-time redundancies will be at Cambridge regional college which expects to make some 186 lecturers redundant. Most part-time cuts, 3,095 out of a total of nearly 3,500, will be in the East Midlands. The main institutions affected will be Clarendon College 528 losses, followed by East Warwickshire, 284, and People's College, 248.