There is much heat but precious little light around the scale of cutbacks and potential job losses in the UK higher education sector. UCU has begun its own “live page of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations and closures” taking place in the sector. It’s the source of the media’s drumbeat of 55 universities cutting back and part of the storyline of a gathering apocalypse for the sector. What is interesting is how slippery and difficult it is to get any real sense of how employment in the sector1 has grown in recent years and the extent that any cutbacks might go deeper than that growth.
It is always wise to start this type of discussion with a recognition that every redundancy is a personal story and the anxiety involved is never to be underestimated. But it’s equally wise to try and understand the reality of what is going on and why. There is no doubt that many in the sector have experienced a windfall in international tuition fees since the Graduate Route was introduced and it’s reasonable to try and understand how they have spent the money.
It’s also worth understanding the extent to which the attrition in university finances, due to the declining real value of domestic tuition fees, since 2012 has changed staff numbers. Previous blogs have considered the sabre rattling around job cuts, the cost of restructuring at some institutions and the reality that some universities (and some courses) might simply be finding it hard to recruit students. In that respect many problems in the sector are localised and a one-size fits all solution of taxpayer funded handouts is unlikely to solve them.
Source: Graph published Mark Corver, Founder and MD of DataHe, LinkedIn
Looking Into a Lacuna
The story from HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) indicates that Academic Staff numbers (excluding atypical) grew from 198,335 in 2014/15 to 217,065 (+9.4%) in 2018/19 and then to 240,420 in 2022/23 (a further 10.8%). Non-academic staff grew from 205,500 in 2014/15 to 222,855 in 2018/19 (+8.4%) but then the trail for non-academic goes cold. That’s because from 2019/20 “it became optional for providers in England and Northern Ireland to report data about staff on non-academic contracts.”
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency
*Atypical contracts are “generally non-permanent contracts for short, one-off, or as-and-when tasks” There were 62,690 atypical academic staff in 2022/23 (down from 75,560 in 2014/15)
NB: The number of institutions reporting in any given year may change.
For a sector that wants to proclaim its impact on the economy it seems a little odd to leave a big gap where half those employed are not fully accounted for. Around a third of institutions declined to report in 2019/20 and the number declining to report had grown to 43%. HESA suggest “caution” in interpreting the data which is little surprise since it has no insight into getting on for half the employers.
Even more disturbing is that HESA Q&As misleadingly suggest that their numbers include “all staff” when the data they point to is only academic staff. GOV.UK is in on the act with the Official Statistics page for Higher education staff data UK:2021 to 2022 confidently linked to HESA data that only shows academic staff numbers. Many have talked about the sector’s approach to transparency and this seems another example of paying lip service to letting its main funders know where there money is going.
You can tell how confused UniversitiesUK are from their Higher Education in numbers release of 15 February 2024, which claims that in 2021-22 “there were 233,930 staff (excluding atypical staff) employed at UK higher education institutions.” The source they quote is HESA staff record 2020-21 – odd as they are giving numbers for 2021-22 – which only has a complete record for academic staff. It seems particularly misleading because the last HESA data (in 2018/19) with both academic and non-academic staff showed a total of 439,955 employed. It’s not like UUK to short-change themselves when making claims about the sector and I suspect it’s just a mistake.
Source: Higher Education Statistics Agency
NB: The snip cannot capture the whole table but all the data is available there.1
A WonkHE blog recently touched on the data gap caused by opting out in the context of technical staff but it seems arguable that the gaping and growing hole in information on non-academic staff borders on the absurd. As with all these things each university has the data and generally publishes a version of it in their Annual Report so that is where one has to now start looking for the answer to the sector’s employment path in recent years.
Filling in the Dots
The data collected and considered below reflects a selection, hopefully a reasonable cross-section, of universities in the UCU list referred to in the opening paragraph. It takes the average FTE of all staff as shown in each university’s annual report since 2017/18. This shows that the number of staff employed rose modestly in the years before the pandemic, stalled during the pandemic years, and then rose more sharply from 2021 to 2023.
On average across all 15 the growth has been 8.8% since 2021 but this masks three universities where numbers have fallen (with Kingston down 5% the largest fall). Growth of 17.7%, 13.5% and 9.7% was seen at the universities of Teesside, Exeter and Central Lancashire respectively.
Average growth of the 12 non-Russell Group institutions has been 6.6% since 2021. Over the longer term since 2018, Lincoln is up 24.1%, Teesside is up 23.6%, and UWE up 19.3%. This puts into some perspective the UCE summary of the cuts:
- Lincoln – “looking to make 220 redundancies” has added 403 FTE since 2018
- Central Lancashire – “looking to cut 165 posts” has added 280 FTE since 2021
- Teesside – looking to open a Voluntary Severance Scheme ‘to review how we deliver our business’ probably needs to review after adding 322 new roles (up 17.7%) in just two years since 2021.
For the three Russell Group universities in the group the overall outlook is skewed by Exeter which has increased FTE staff numbers every year since 2017/18. Newcastle’s growth has been below the average of the 15 modelled and Cardiff were slightly above the average. UCU tell us that Exeter has ‘opened a Voluntary Severance Scheme’ and that Newcastle ‘has a voluntary severance scheme across all faculties without targets or numbers.’ Cardiff is ‘planning to cut Ancient Languages’.
The overall employment data has not been disaggregated for Academic v Non-Academic but there is no doubt that in some institutions growth of administrative staff has significantly outpaced that on the academic side. That is not a judgement on whether administrative jobs are more or less important than academic roles but the lack of insight on what is happening across the sector is one reason that the lack of HESA data is so infuriating. The sector really lets itself down when it can’t even be bothered to say how it is adding to employment.
Solving the Right Problem
It is unclear whether the highly publicized cutbacks in the sector are doing much more than correcting course after adding staff to meet a short term windfall that is now likely to disappear. In some cases, the correction appears to be significantly less than the growth in employment evident in recent years. Again, this is not to minimize how difficult that can be for those concerned but one may have to ask whether senior management really thought the bonanza was sustainable when they started hiring.
As identified in another blog there also seem to be some universities that are in a state of almost perpetual crisis because of an inability to recruit domestic students and the short-term bonus of international students was gratefully grasped. It also seems likely that some courses have deteriorated in popularity to an extent where the sector, the government or another body may need to determine how to sustain research and learning through combined action. Fundamental questions around the value of universities to local economies and the preservation of some academic disciplines may be better placed in the context of levelling up and cultural heritage than graduate visas.
NOTES
- Those who would point me to the 385,500 FTE claimed by London Economics in their August 2023 report for Universities UK might care to go and re-read the basis for it. In the methodology section London Economics confirm that only 217 of 303 institutions reported data to HESA in 2021/22. The London Economics estimate is based on the 20`18/19 ratio of academic to non-academic. May or may not be right and it would be better to have certainty and a decent time series.
- There is an argument that because the reporting of these numbers changed after 2018/19 the subsequent numbers do not compare like with like. That is true but all that reaffirms is that the record is inadequate. As we see above, London Economics seems content to use 2018/19 as a solid starting point. As more institutions decline to provide details on non-academic staff the gap between reality and return gets wider and even the post 2019/20 record gets sketchier.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay