As the clamour around redundancies in the higher education sector grows it is difficult to see where financial distress starts and misleading data ends. In January this year Patrick Jack claimed in the Times Higher that in 2023/24, “..severance payments, which do not reflect the whole of the sector, affected about 10,300 employees – up from 7,300 the year before..”. The implication is that there were nearly 17,500 job losses over two years with more to come in 2024/25.
The problem is that, if the sector’s returns to HESA are accurate, this claim is misleading. While it is entirely possible that individuals will have taken severance as universities restructure there may have been many new jobs recreated. A recent LinkedIn posting by Colin Bailey of Queen Mary University of London claimed 66 job vacancies with Queen Mary’s UCU branch countering that there are 59 redundancies possible at the institution.
Looking over the longer term it seems clear that the sector has had an extraordinarily good run of adding headcount and that this has accelerated in recent years. Several commentators, including me, have noted that recent growth in staff numbers has been fuelled by an unsustainable bonanza in international student income. The party had to stop sometime.
The real problem for the UK is that in the absence of central control and the evidence of university mismanagement there is no guarantee that the sector is acting strategically. It is quite possible that the wrong jobs are being lost in the wrong disciplines in the wrong geographical locations. That is a good reason there should be no “one size fits all” financial bailout of the sector.
A golden decade of growth in academic staff employed
HESA data shows a decade of additional academic jobs every year since 2014/15. The growth in numbers employed over the last five reported years (23,405) has been even faster than the growth of the five years before (18,730). In the last two reported years alone more than 12,000 academic staff were added.
* The cognoscenti will know that “atypical” academic staff are listed separately. It is reasonable to note that from 2021/22 to 2023/24 the number of atypical staff fell by about 400 to 62,730.
Before anyone starts howling that the growth is driven by a fragmented, gig economy of fractional posts it’s worth considering that the FTE number show the same pattern. From 2014/15 to 2018/19 an additional 13,515 FTE were added but from 2019/20 to 2023/24 a further 17,070 were added. From 2012/22 to 2023/24 the total growth of 12,910 in total academic staff compared to FTE growth of 9,915. The most recent year reported showed growth of nearly 10,000 FTE on the year before.
So, if there was a net loss of 10,000 FTE academic jobs in the current round of redundancies employment levels would fall to about where they were in 2021/22. That might make some sort of sense if the employment of academics was largely fuelled by growing numbers of international students. But any job losses being publicized aren’t just about academic staff.
Let’s not forget the professional staff
The professional staff in universities, quite properly, don’t want to be overlooked so they must also be taken into the overall count. Regrettably the numbers are harder to get at. It is a well recorded disgrace that many universities took the opportunity to shield the growth in their non-academic staff numbers from HESA records at the first possible opportunity.
The last full set in the HESA data is 2018/19 when 166 institutions recorded the detail of non-academic headcount with 222,885 staff. By 2023/24 only 125 showed employment of non-academic staff. The lack of transparency is very unhelpful in gaining public understanding or trust.
Evidence from individual institutions suggests that non-academic staff employment growth has at least kept pace with academic staff growth and in some cases has exceeded it. But if we apply the same percentage growth rate as in academic staff from 2018/19 it is plausible that non-academic numbers grew by 13.8% from 222,885 to 253,643 by 2023/24.
Adding the estimated non-academic employment to the known academic numbers suggests that total employment in the UK higher education sector stood at around 500,000. The number employed could well have grown by over 20,000 from 2021/22 to 2023/24. In this context a reduction of 10,000 in the overall workforce seems more like a correction than a catastrophe.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay