Union calls for block on Scottish redundancies

THE Association of University Teachers Scotland has called on higher education institutions to stick to a policy of no compulsory redundancies in the wake of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council's allocations. The AUTS calculates that 11 of the 21 SHEFC-funded universities and colleges will suffer a cut in real terms, with the worst-hit, Northern College of Education, dropping by 8.1 per cent. Bernard King, principal of the University of Abertay Dundee, which won the highest increase, of 2.6 per cent, among the new universities, attacked the allocations as giving less than 3 per cent of total research funding to "the modern universities".