UCU Commons newsletter #17, 20 May 2026
Dear subscriber
Welcome to the UCU Commons newsletter, a curated set of links and information about what's happening in UCU Commons, our union, and our sectors more generally. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have on this or any other matter. This edition of the newsletter is a shorter one than usual, as we are busy preparing for Congress. We will be sending out a separate Congress Bulletin before Congress opens.
In today's issue:
What UCU Commons have been doing
We’ve released two reports covering the NEC meeting on the 13th March and the HEC on the 17th of April. We’re happy to report that both meetings were broadly productive, working through technical issues and most motions passed with near or actual unanimity. The April HEC represents the last meeting of the current cohort, as we look forward to welcoming many new members after congress, including our own Alex Prichard and Gillian Jack who are joining for the first time after the recent elections.
News from UCU
This week, following its last iteration in 2021, the longitudinal UCU Workload Survey has been relaunched. All members are invited to participate and invite their colleagues (both members and non-members) to do so. The survey takes about 25 minutes to complete, and there is an opportunity to enter a prize draw to win 5 x £50 vouchers.
Tilly Fitzmaurice, a casualised member and a former representative of casualised members in HE, says: “It was no surprise to me whatsoever that in 2021, this survey found that staff in FE and HE were working an average of two extra unpaid days per week. With the current restructuring and redundancy crises, I anticipate that the chronic workload problems in our sector have only worsened, as waves of job cuts and voluntary severance deplete departments, teams and units across our workplaces. I would strongly encourage all colleagues, whether UCU members or not, to complete this survey, and especially precarious or casualised members. Our workloads in our day jobs are often high enough, without the hidden and invisibilised work of job applications and unpaid research that goes unaccounted for in workload allocation models.”
On Wednesday 13th May, the Anticasualisation Committee held a webinar on ‘subject to funding’ open-ended contracts with Ian Higham, anticasualisation committee member and chair of the UCU branch at LSE. This was an incredibly helpful webinar and the video is now available, so we strongly recommend watching it and then sharing it far and wide.
In our sectors
On 6th May, the University of Hertfordshire announced that it would close all eight Humanities undergraduate programmes, and the reason given for this was that these programmes are “not financially viable.” There has been no consultation with staff on these closures and staff have not been given the information they have requested. A petition has been created calling for these course closures to be stopped, and it has already attracted over 3,700 signatures. We invite all our subscribers to sign and share this petition.
The Migrant Advisory Committee (MAC) has recently published a new report finding that settlement changes that make it harder to stay in the UK may disproportionately affect those on the Skilled Worker visa route working in Higher Education. This report has been written up with commentary by WonkHE.
Vivek Thuppil, a representative of migrant members in HE on the National Executive Committee, says: ‘International academics are highly mobile and the UK higher education sector already struggles to attract the best talent after 15 years of lagging wages. The UK Government's settlement proposals would be yet another nail in the coffin to a sector that is already teetering on the edge of collapse, if international academics view the UK as a parochial insular backwater and choose to take their talents elsewhere.’
The House of Commons Education Committee have published a report entitled HE and Funding: Threat of Insolvency and International Students. The report is lengthy and thorough and confirms the ‘compelling evidence that, without urgent and coordinated action, there is clear possibility of a university closing’. It points to the fee freeze, the reliance on international student numbers, the impact of the pandemic, but also the positive impact that universities have on their local economy. UK-elected NEC member, Matt Barnard, says ‘On the one hand, the contents of this report will not be a surprise for anyone working in this sector. However, it is refreshing and extremely helpful that an official Parliamentary report is finding what we already know to be true. This can only help us in our efforts to lobby MPs and put pressure on the UK Government to admit what they surely already know, that the current funding regime cannot continue.’
We hope you have enjoyed this round up. Want to get involved? Join UCU Commons and work with us towards a more effective union for post-16 education here.
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