Teaching caps at risk as Brighton redraws academics’ contracts

Academics at the University of Brighton fear that proposed changes to their contracts will see them lose time protected for research and spend more hours teaching.

A consultation has begun at the institution on new terms and conditions that would, the local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) said, break the post-92 national contract because lecturers would be asked to teach for about 25 hours a week, more than the current weekly cap of 18 hours.

Currently, 20 per cent of a lecturer’s role – about 320 hours annually for a full-time position – is allocated for research and scholarly activity, but this could be reduced or abolished under the proposals. Instead, staff would be given the option to bid to buy out more time to pursue research projects.

A university spokesman said that Brighton’s academic workforce structure and contractual conditions were “increasingly out of step with sector standards” and that many comparator institutions had already implemented similar changes.

The university was not looking to reduce pay, increase the total number of hours staff were expected to work or increase the maximum number of weeks that staff would be expected to teach in any year, the spokesman said.

Instead, he said, Brighton was aiming to introduce more flexibility than “current rigid weekly maximums” allow and was exploring “whether a mix of more intensive periods of teaching across the academic year would work more effectively for students, and whether this could then release staff time for more concentrated periods of research”.

But Ryan Burns, the branch secretary of the University of Brighton UCU, said that while other institutions may have introduced some similar measures, none had proposed changes to the national contract on the scale of what Brighton was seeking to do.

“The reason we are able to teach at universities is because we do research, whether that is people who actually publish research or because we read around the subject area and maintain and update our expertise,” he said.

“There is a fear among staff that this is being eroded. There are lots of questions about, if these changes go through, are we legitimately going to be able to call ourselves a university?”

Brighton has also opened a new voluntary severance scheme after cutting 165 jobs in 2022-23, and it intends to introduce two new categories of teaching-focused roles: graduate teaching assistants, to provide “opportunities for our postgraduate researchers to develop their skills for future academic careers”; and teaching fellows.

The UCU has highlighted that the assistant position will be paid at grade 6 on the national pay spine, whereas previously postgraduate students have been employed as hourly lecturers, a grade 7 post.

Dr Burns said UCU feared the creation of a “two-tier workforce” and a move away from Brighton as a research institution, citing other factors including the closure of research centres and the loss of “some of our best and most prominent researchers” in the last redundancy round.

The university spokesman said Brighton’s “aim is to create an agile, diverse and flexible workforce with a focus on teaching-related activities alongside new opportunities for staff to support research, scholarship and professional practice development”.

“This could reward staff who are research-active by encouraging them to buy out additional time for research whilst providing a better framework for staff on a less research-intensive route to secure promotion and progression.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com