It took Susanna 10 years before she was promoted to senior teaching fellow, and she says she was one of the lucky ones. Many new teaching-only contracts awarded in her department at a leading research university are “non progressable” – there is no expectation that teaching staff will go any further within the institution.
“It’s demoralising. You feel, ‘why should I do the extra mile if my mile isn’t being recognised?’” she says. “It doesn’t give promotion, and it doesn’t even give praise.”
She is not alone. New research carried out by John McCormack, lecturer in management at Cranfield University, has found that university teaching staff resent the way they are made to feel second-class citizens, inferior to researchers. With Matthew Bamber, of the University of Toronto, and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, of the University of Lincoln, McCormack interviewed 51 teaching staff at 20 research-intensive universities in Britain. Many reported feeling “locked in” by structural and social barriers they felt were insurmountable, and unable to become “proper academics”.
“There was a consistency of response saying if you were in one of those roles the system wasn’t designed for you,” says McCormack.
Zero hours contracts, pay below the minimum wage (once the time spent marking and preparation is included), and contracts that exclude the summer, are common among a workforce expected to meet ever greater demands from students seeking value for money as fees increase. The spotlight on vice-chancellors’ enormous pay, when many academics struggle with their bills, has added to the outrage felt by many university teachers.
Last month an open letter calling for an end to the proliferation of short-term teaching contracts in UK humanities departments gathered more than 1,600 signatures from lecturers in five days.
Around a quarter of academic staff in the Russell Group of research-intensive universities are categorised as teaching-only – fewer than across the sector as a whole, but the number is growing. This is partly as a result of the government’s new teaching excellence framework (Tef), which aims to help redress the balance between research and teaching. Results of the framework, published in June, show only eight of the 24-strong Russell Group gained the highest rating – gold – in the Tef; the London School of Economics, the top university in Britain based on the proportion of world-leading research produced, was one of three Russell Group members awarded the lowest ranking, bronze.
While many university teachers welcome the recognition the Tef is intended to give their profession, they dislike the metrics on which it is based: it relies on the national student survey – a questionnaire filled in by students about their university experience – and statistics about graduate employment, which they argue gives little idea of what goes on in the lecture or seminar room.
Some are also concerned it will make their job harder. “We will be little hamsters running on a wheel trying to check off the Tef rather than being innovative teachers,” says one. “It changes the relationship you have with students.”
Gervas Huxley, a teaching fellow in the economics department at Bristol University, and once described as one of universities’ minister Jo Johnson’s Numskulls (the Numskulls was a Beano comic strip about a team of tiny technicians who lived inside people’s heads and ran their minds), says challenging the dominance of research over teaching is overdue. But while he supports the principle behind the Tef, he is not convinced it will change things.
He argues that in research universities, an unsuccessful researcher in their early fifties would usually be in a more senior position – and earning more – than a successful teacher. “I would never argue that the most successful academics don’t merit the rewards they get,” he says. “But most academics aren’t superstars and many aren’t producing research that’s particularly original, and yet they have higher rewards than we do.”
He blames the traditional idea that teaching should be led by research. “The problem with research-led teaching is a lot of researchers aren’t good at it, and even if they are, they don’t have time.” He says that as a result, students receive minimal contact time in large groups.
Huxley would like to see the Tef incorporate a measure for class sizes and contact hours. “I think the Russell Group have benefited from higher tuition fees but have not delivered their side of the bargain,” he says. “British universities are among the best funded in the world at a time of unparalleled austerity.”
Others argue that the tradition of research-led teaching means that teaching-only staff are expected to keep up with the latest developments in their subject while dealing with a full teaching timetable and all the pastoral care that goes with it.
Jonathan White, bargaining policy and negotiations officer at the University and College Union, says: “It’s not just they cannot progress or move over from teaching-only to the traditional academic pathway, it’s that they aren’t given time to do the job properly.”
He also questions why, if universities claim to value teaching, most teaching-only staff are on short-term contracts, when that is not true of traditional teaching and research roles.
One teacher at a Russell Group university, who is waiting to see whether her contract will be renewed next year, says she ends up doing research in her spare time in the hope of producing enough publications to secure a full academic job. “I’m really concerned about getting stuck in this kind of work because I don’t think there is very far I can progress,” she says.
Stefania Paredes Fuentes, a senior teaching fellow in economics at the University of Warwick, says that while she now has a permanent full-time contract and a senior position, this is unusual and she is sympathetic to younger staff trying to get a mortgage on rolling one-year contracts. “You get recognition and everything else because of research,” she says. “Research is considered to bring money and prestige and it has created a huge bias in universities, and in some more than others.”
McCormack says: “If you are recognised as a brilliant teacher there is no money in it for the university. The difference between someone who gets very good student feedback as a teacher and someone who gets mediocre feedback isn’t very big.”
His study found that many research-intensive universities offloaded heavy teaching allocations to teaching-only staff to give researchers more time to publish. Some even threatened researchers who failed to publish with extra teaching, and rewarded those who published particularly significant research work with less teaching.
A Russell Group spokesman says its members are independent when it comes to staffing matters but all consider quality teaching a core element of the student experience. “Our universities have always made teaching a priority,” he says. “Our universities are keen to recognise and reward skilled teachers through education-led routes to promotion and teaching awards.”
Source:-theguardian
