Opening statement – 100% behind the lecturers and their right and reason to strike. I know there are a few Uni staff on here, looking for some advice.

My daughter’s in first year of an undergraduate degree studying media and creative industries.

Her taught time is a mix of lectures, small class seminars, and then one day a week “Media Lab” where they get to be creative with all the technical equipment, learning how to make film, video, audio, edit stuff, all the practical skills. And then a lot of self-learning, etc as you’d expect for an arts degree (!)  Surprisingly she is doing all right at this – if you’re surprised that her Dad was a master of the 3am lab report crisis before a 10am hand in deadline 😳

Because of the way the strike days are falling she is going to miss a fair proportion of her taught classes and it’s not clear if these will be rescheduled or just ‘here’s the notes to read’ (maybe even they can recycle Covid recorded lectures?). She’s also going to miss a couple of full day medialab sessions and it seems these are hard to reschedule as the equipment is also used by other courses and years on other days, so no ‘spare’ days. Also they are losing some of their days and with justification probably get first call on any spare days, if they are closer to graduation, etc.

Should she put a complaint in to the University and if so who through? As said she supports the strikes – the intent is not to guilt the lecturers but the University who aren’t paying fair increases despite having in some cases huge reserves. At the same time, she’s paying £9000 a year for an agreed level of services and will be getting (guess because we don’t know how long it’ll go on / chances to reschedule) 10-15% less than she signed up for. It’s not about the money, rather whether it exerts pressure in the right places.

FWIW – thanks again to those that helped with our UCAS / admissions cock-up. Your advice really helped and she is loving the Uni (Warwick), the experience, the course and staff, and everything that goes with it.

It’s not that different to the COVID disruptions so the Uni must have a plan of how to catch up

My lad’s in his second year and faces a similar issue. At a uni with an obscene amount of reserves. Loves getting grief from striking staff as he crosses their picket line to go to the library to do the work they’ve set.

I can’t see complaining will achieve anything though. Strikes do cause disruption. Unless students as a group take action against the uni in support of the staff, I think it’s going to fall on deaf ears.

so the Uni must have a plan of how to catch up

This seems like a generous assessment.

so the Uni must have a plan of how to catch up

As I said, chucking lecture notes or a recording at them is ‘a solution’ but it’s more lost time on scarce and sought after equipment that is harder to reschedule

And while of course it’s also about the educational aspect – the question’s whether it will have any effect on supporting the staff.

Unless students as a group take action against the uni in support of the staff

I also suggested she drop into the NUS office and ask them.

My comment was tongue in cheek. My nephew is in 3rd year now and his whole course has been a massive shitshow. The unis are happy to take the fees but don’t deliver the teaching that the students go into debt for.

sorry, missed that.

Definitely complain. If you’re genuinely in support of the strikes, you should pursue reparations for the uni failing to deliver the service that you’ve paid for. It’s not fair on your daughter.

Putting pressure on the institution is the best thing you can do. I’m a uni professor and union member who fully supports the strikes (although I’m not striking today, as I’m not teaching at the moment and it would achieve nothing). I’ve had a 20% real terms pay cut over the last 10 years, and my pension benefits have been slashed, and that doesn’t seem fair either. HE in the UK is broken (as are many things), and something needs to change.

Btw, lectures *won’t* be rescheduled, as no-one will teach them, and non-striking colleagues won’t backfill.

OP, your daughter should highlight her concerns to the Registrar and the SU rep(s) on campus. The Students Union will almost certainly be doing this anyway but its good to make her feelings clear to the college as well.

Best advice is start by talking to the course Student Rep who is the primary link between the year/course students group and the Course. The Student Rep (if they are taking their responsibilities seriously) will be liaising with the Students Union on this.

It’s a fair complaint as there is a contract, as detailed in the course handbook, between the student (who has paid fees for studying) and the academic establishment that needs to be honoured on both sides. If the college cannot hold up their side of the contract due to strike action they need to have a recovery plan in place for the students and/or an acceptable alternative.

They should be re-scheduling teaching – we certainly are (Uni where I work). Depends if her tutor is a hardened Union person – she’d be best complaining to those on strike, as well as the course leader as they should be getting lessons back. My daughter studies Animation where I work, and she’s in – lessons are on, as are class/lab sessions. I’m having to ditch my cycle commute and driver her in because the bloody train drivers are on strike again.

The only lessons she’s had on-line have been due to rail strikes and the lecturer not being able to get in, and a number of other pupils not being able to commute.

TBH, people will flame for this, but I don’t support the strikes as it affects the student experience. I’m in working. I can’t afford to lose pay, and although I’ve had loss of salary in real terms over the 15 years I’ve been here, pension loss etc, the grass isn’t greener on the other side.

The economy is knackered. Uni’s are relatively flat lined for income – tuition fees haven’t gone up in years, but inflation and pay rises have. Even with say 2% pay rise, you are looking at pay cost drift way in excess of 5%. We’ve got less staff in our Faculty this year, but pay has drifted up by £2m, with no more tuition fees to pay for it.

There is no magic money tree as most academics think !

interesting comments, thanks for being honest

My daughter is doing a lot of self study. Biggest issue they have had is equipment. Their class size has grown from previous years, and as a student that travels is, the only time she can get time on equipment/software is out of hours. A number of them now have ‘hacked’ versions of their software on their personal laptops as the software is very expensive.

Your daughter needs to ask when their lecturers will be rescheduled. We’ve put contingency plans in place to ensure most students do get taught.

My wife is striking – it’s nothing to do with pay, it’s terms & conditions and workload.

These days student want more, they want in person, despite the fact that only 20% will attend, thus they want recordings, which have to be checked and eddited and they want FULL notes, not an overview with recommended reading, but EVERYTHING provided. They also want individualised feedback, single person tutor sessions and fully 1/3 of students are now applying for mitigating circumstances, which means MUCH more admin, more marking sessions and more reviews. Post Covid, they want everything additional they had during Covid and everything they had before. Many staff are leaving as there’s no time to do research and so there’s less people to teach/mark and admin and budgets have been cut to the bone, so there’s no support.

In summary – Demands have gone up, workload has gone up, pressure to deliver has never been higher (student experience/REF), Staffing has decreased, budgets have decreased, pensions have decreased ad-nauseum. Another thing that’s been noted is that students coming through these days are much less prepared for university than a few years ago…It’s NOT an extension of A-level.

And before anyone comes with holidays – you’re not allowed to take any holidays during teaching time (October>June) and you have to be available for marking/exams (May-July) and now to mark the vast number of resits/Mit Circs (July and August) – so when can you actually take time off? When do you prepare new content, when do you do research that brings in money and reputation?

WHY would you do this for £40k a year when, with a degree, PhD and vast research experience, you could get an easier, higher paying job where you’re not treated like crap by both your employers and your students?

To the OP – complain if you want, but significant chnages to the system are required to bring in stability and a better experience for all and continual expansion of student requirements/demands are part of that.

I guess the demands by the students for all that are pretty much in line with expectations of paying 9.5k a year for an education.

The lecturers have withdrawn their labour, and losing pay in doing so. Under ASOS they are under no obligation to reschedule teaching. Doing so dilutes the action taken. https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/12469/FAQs

Some Unis may have recorded material which they have taken the IP of. It depends on the Uni and the lecturers. Adjustments will be made in examination.

I’ve left the Uni sector now (fixed term contract ended) but if she supports the strike the best thing she can do is engage and complain through NUS. Write and complain but make it clear the University senior leadership should be doing more to negotiate. Note these specific complaints have been going on since 2018, and complaints about degradation of the pension since 2011.

She can also see if other (non academic) staff can give them access to equipment, if she feels that is an important skill to practise but knowing there would be no guidance. Even in my sixth form we were trusted with access to a media studio.

To give the counterargument, the Uni sector is broken and has been degraded since 1994. Precarity in the workforce (teaching being done on zero hours contracts, researchers having to move every 9-12 months), reduced pay and pensions, ridiculous workload and particularly bureaucracy implemented and enforced by the Uni senior management… the sector is not attractive, it stifles diversity of people and thought, and people are so overworked they can’t give their best. So our UK education suffers and our UK R&D suffers. The Union has to have a tangible, quantifiable thing to negotiate on, so the ballot talks about pay & pension, but this dispute is far broader, deeper, long-term and paramount to what the future UK looks like. I agree some Unis can’t afford to pay to have adequate, qualified staffing levels for the workload they require. But others can. Do those Unis who cannot provide the service they promise and remunerate adequate qualified staff numbers working 40 hour weeks need to fail or restructure?

It’s analogous to all the other strikes, Government and the private sector have been taking advantage of the goodwill of the type of person who chooses to work in these sectors, but you can’t recruit, train and retain enough staff to keep the system afloat. So something has to change.

My nephew is in 3rd year now and his whole course has been a massive shitshow. The unis are happy to take the fees but don’t deliver the teaching that the students go into debt for.

As the father to 3 daughters who are also in yr3 all I will say is – ^ this x 100.

Complain all you like but they couldn’t give a shit.

My wife is striking – it’s nothing to do with pay, it’s terms & conditions and workload.

This. The whole higher education sector is a shit show, and the pressures on staff to deliver REF IMHO is detrimental to standard of teaching. Add the ever increasing admin workload leads to either unreasonable hours or something slipping. All this, for more junior lecturers at least, is mostly laid on them whilst being given short term contracts resulting in zero job security unless you can find time to keep the research grants coming in to fund your position.

If your daughters wants value for money from her £9k, support the strike and join the demand for an overhaul of the way HE is run.

WHY would you do this for £40k a year when, with a degree, PhD and vast research experience, you could get an easier, higher paying job where you’re not treated like crap by both your employers and your students?

Even if it wasn’t higher paying, the other factors still apply. The added bonus is there might actually be jobs to apply for too.

Complain all you like but they couldn’t give a shit.

No doubt, but if you don’t say anything it’s taken as acceptance

The vast, vast majority of lecturers and teaching staff really do care about the students. But striking from teaching and marking is the most impactful action to the University. So please do complain but make it relate to Senior Management and the way the University is run and rewards its staff. I do think most Uni Senior Management only consider the students in financial terms, from their loans and from good Student Survey results, which affects their income from Government. Unis are just huge corporate companies run by corporate bosses trying to maximise their bottom line.

if she supports the strike the best thing she can do is engage and complain through NUS.

Is that right? Genuine question. I’ve worked as both a lecturer and in HE policy and, in my experience, no-one much cares what the NUS say apart from the NUS.

I would think a written complaint addressed jointly to the head of your daughter’s school/dept and the VC (obviously they won’t read it, but you might as well aim for their office) would be better.

A colleague has just heard a few students saying they support the strike, but their experience of Uni has been ruined because of the action. As has been said, student’s are less and less prepared for Uni, and expect it to be like college, it’s not. They expect more and more support, which puts pressure on staff.

Given we’ve a large number of lecturers in, it’s pot luck if you get a strong union/strike supporter which will ruin the student’s experience – the lecturers/tuition can’t always be replaced especially if it’s subject specific and reliant on one or two specialists.

Yes writing directly to the Course Coordinator and HoS about specific resolutions / support she wants is helpful. And writing to HoS and Vice Chancellor’s office more broadly about the strike compact is also helpful though as you say I am sure they are overwhelmed so details will be lost. NUS and the Student Rep for the course can help discuss and solidify, for her, what are her primary concerns and what can be practically addressed and how.

NUS material including a template letter

I guess the demands by the students for all that are pretty much in line with expectations of paying 9.5k a year for an education

This.

And I still apply the same expectations to tax payers money being spent, not just personal money/loans being spent.

This seems though to be an endemic, structure and leadership issue, not individual lecturers. I therefore support them taking action over the pressures.

I started a thread on these issues for my son. He’s hearing that perhaps half his course are considering not completing the masters they started on, and bailing at the degree only.

Poor uni course, what to do…?

People need to stop conflating the fee increase with a required/commensurate increase in service – this is where the problem lies.

You pay for a University Education. Whether that be £1k, £3k or £9K. The alteration of the fee shouldn’t need to alter what’s taught or the capabilities of the students being taught. Are you suggesting that those who paid £1k, or £3k were somehow less well taught? Does your milk (now that it costs £3) need to be 3* better than it did? Should it be delivered better, should it somehow be more accommodating to you?

I’d argue the opposite – by increasing the demands for MORE MORE MORE from students>lecturers, you reduce their ability to deliver excellent content by forcing them to bend over backwards for every little whim of their high fee paying students. You actually dilute what’s being taught and significantly! In the first year, lecturers attempt to normalise student ability, but in recent years that’s become MUCH MUCH harder as students expect universities to build them up – there’s little to no personal responsibility from individuals. This is MUCH worse with online delivered content as it’s much harder to see where you are in the group or to get help from others in the group.

Without going into a major rant, fees have been the death of HE in the UK. For the students, it is now 100% transactional (I’ve paid, what do I do to get the first class degree?) rather than intellectual (how do I engage with the subject, and in doing so, gain subject specific and transferable skills that allow independence of thought and initiative, that will make me a net contributor to society?). Student behaviour is much more instrumental than it used to be – they work super hard for any thing that is assessed, and don’t turn up for anything that isn’t.

It used to be a privilege and a pleasure to work in research and teaching in UK HE (I’ve been teaching and researching at various institutions since the mid-90s), even though the salaries have always been weak for the training required. Now we’re just glorified secondary school teachers with little time for research (however many grants we bring in), and I can’t wait to retire.

+1 Daffy.

Although the milk inflation analogy falls down, because – unlike everything else – fees have actually only gone up once in the past 11 years, to £9,250 in 2017/18. Which equates to about £6,300 in 2012 prices when £9k fees were introduced.

The ‘unit of resource’ (amount of funding per domestic student) that English unis have has now fallen to a level last seen in the early 2000s when fees were ~£3k, because the amount of direct grant funding they receive from govt fell off a cliff in 2012.

Who’s asking for more?

She’s paying £9250 for a year’s course.  £3K a term in simple terms. For which she expects a certain amount of teaching and lab time.

At current estimates for this announced strike period only she’s going to be getting about 80-85% of what she’s paid for. She got most of last term’s (one strike affected day) and who knows what in T3?

If you paid your milkman a pound for a litre and he delivered 850ml for the same price, you’d just accept it?

I get all the underlying cost increases in staff, and everything else that goes to running a Uni. I also reflect most of them either make a surplus or are sitting on big surpluses from the past (affected though by pension revaluations, albeit as I understand it they’re clawing that back by offering less pension provision in future). I’d even accept that tuition fees probably need to go up (NWS politics of whether University tuition is an investment in the national capability, or an investment by the individual in themselves – we have fees and they probably need revision)

Who’s asking for more?

She’s paying £9250 for a year’s course. £3K a term in simple terms. For which she expects a certain amount of teaching and lab time.

This is heart of the problem. You’re paying a shit load to get less than previous generations got for free, because, as Finbar notes, Unis have less to spend per student than they had 20 years ago. And as your paying for it, students rightly expect ‘something’, when in fact for most non-vocational subjects what you need is some guidance about what you should be learning, a library/other resource, the right attitude, and time.

I’m hoping my kids just get a trade.

LOL at £9k buying an education. Look up fees at any private school and adjust your expectations accordingly.

LOL at £9k buying an education. Look up fees at any private school and adjust your expectations accordingly.

You get an awful lot more contact time at a private school

You get an awful lot more contact time at a private school

You certainly do. You should get a lot less at uni, unless we think that Uni is simply another three years of school.

My suggestion is, rather than jump right in and complain, for your daughter to email the Head of Department for the subject and politely ask how the missed content will be made up. As part of that highlight the media lab and ask how they will be catching up on the missed days.

If there isn’t a satisfactory answer, then think about complaining.

Who’s asking for more?

She’s paying £9250 for a year’s course. £3K a term in simple terms. For which she expects a certain amount of teaching and lab time.

Indirectly – You are. You’re expecting compensation based on a believed deficit in the quality of education to be provided due to missing a lab and a a lecture or two. You don’t pay for a set number of lectures, labs, notes, or exams, heck, you’re not paying for a degree. You’re paying someone to provide a expertise and guidance intended to scaffold and support your young adults development into a professional. How they do that is their business. It was never historically explained precisely what form the tuition would take, just the broad strokes of the syllabus and its intended direction.

In this case, the student will still be expected to pass an exam/coursework assessment which is externally verified. To do that, they must have completed a package of work which allows for this. If you seriously believe that this won’t be provided by the time she completes, go ahead, complain, stop expecting something back.

Serious question – How many lectures do you think she’ll miss herself during the 3 years? None? 1? 2? Previously, you’d have had to catchup with that using notes from a friend or very sparse course notes. Not now, there’s a video, a personal session, comprehensive notes, past exams and of course mitigating circumstances.

Uni might talk with staff about rescheduling missed lessons but these have to be negotiated. The striking staff are withholding their labour from the employer it is up to them to do something about it (negotiate a decent package) no TUC union member should cover the work, the striker cannot be asked to put work out to cover their strike time.

Your daughter’s issue is with the uni not the lecturers (the uni’s issue is with the staff). Complain that uni is not able to fulfill its contract.

In terms of student expectations and the hideous idea of transactional higher education, the analogy I like to use here is that university is like a gym. In the same way that paying gym fees gives you access to what you need to make your body strong, attending university gives you access to what you need to learn about the subject you have chosen. If you pay your fees but don’t attend/put the effort in, then you won’t reach the desired outcome.

I very much doubt that prospective uni students are told that at school.

Loves getting grief from striking staff as he crosses their picket line to go to the library to do the work they’ve set.

This sounds completely implausible. I work at a Uni (not a an academic) and they are the politest picket lines you could imagine. Whatever people’s opinion on the strikes I just cannot believe that academic staff would give students “grief” for crossing a picket line to do their work.

Its literally a bunch of book-worms and scientists drinking tea and occasionally handing out leaflets.

If you complain then it should put more pressure on the University to resolve the dispute.

Loves getting grief from striking staff as he crosses their picket line to go to the library to do the work they’ve set.

This sounds completely implausible. I work at a Uni (not a an academic) and they are the politest picket lines you could imagine.

My 1st year daughter has gone to visit a friend in Manchester because her uni week has ben disrupted by strikes. She messaged this morning saying ‘strikers…outside the building here and we stopped to get stickers. The guy asked if we knew what they were striking for and we said yes and he asked us why we weren’t on the picket line’. It may have been polite, may have been grief… 😀