Following a motion that passed at our last General Meeting, today we wrote to Susan Deighan, Glasgow Life Chief Executive, Councillor Annette Christie, Chair of Glasgow Life and Councillor Susan Aitken, Leader of Glasgow City Council to condemn cuts to museums across Glasgow, and planned redundancies. 

We stand with colleagues at UNISON against these cuts.

You can read our letter below:

Dear Susan, Annette and Susan,  

We, the University and College Union branch based at the University of Glasgow, are deeply concerned that a significant amount of Glasgow Museums staff are threatened with redundancies. These redundancies target key roles such as curators, conservators, technicians, learning assistants and collections staff. This is extremely short sighted and destructive and will involve a significant loss of expertise to venues and communities int the city. 

The cuts will impact staff who are integral to the success of world class and award-winning venues in the city such as Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery and the Burrell Collection. 

The cuts will also have a very significant impact on innovative roles that Glasgow Museums play, which are very significant in relation to issues of social and cultural inclusion in the city such as the Open Museums service. These projects and staff have also been central to significant forms of engagement with diverse populations in the city, e.g. recent work with the Bangladesh Association Glasgow on the histories of South Asian seafarers in the city. 

Glasgow Museums staff have also been integral to significant collaborative work with staff in the University of Glasgow, for example through projects such as Banner Tales which used an engagement with Glasgow Museums’ collection of banners of trade unions and political campaigns to explore key aspects of Glasgow’s history of labour and community organising. These cuts would really impact on the capacity of important collaborative work like this – which are beneficial to both institutions. 

We therefore call on you to reverse these cuts, and work together with staff to prevent any redundancies. 

Bes wishes,  

UCU Glasgow Branch 

The UCU Glasgow Committee met on Wednesday, 2 August 2023 and agreed to send the following message to the UCU General Secretary Jo Grady, and other UCU elected officials.

Dear Jo (cc: President, Vice-President HE, Vice-President FE, HEC members),

We are writing to you in relation to your all-member email sent on 1st August updating us on negotiations with UCEA.

Our branch committee met today. We are concerned that the current timetable you have set out for a ballot to renew our mandate would almost certainly leave a gap between our existing mandate and any future mandate. This will make it hard for branches to maintain momentum with their action. If members are required to complete outstanding marking during this gap, ballot turnout and the impact of future action under a new mandate could be negatively affected.

We agree that it is important to maximise democracy in decision-making and welcome discussion on the way forward. But we feel our members would feel more secure if they knew their discussion could take place with the safety provided to them of a renewed and continuous mandate.

We therefore urge you and the President and Vice-President to reconsider your decision and bring forward HEC as soon as possible to enact the decision of Congress to call a summer ballot. If it is impossible to call a live meeting, we urge you to enable an alternative mechanism for HEC to make the decision in a timely manner.

In solidarity, and on behalf of the University of Glasgow UCU branch committee,

Maha Rafi Atal and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

With summer 2023 graduations now past, we have seen the significant impact of the MAB with many students leaving without degree classifications. In order to ensure the degree factory continued to graduate as many students as possible, however, our management has broken our rigorous academic standards with a variety of “mitigation” strategies. This is particularly depressing when we consider that the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, which safeguards higher education standards in Scotland) has only this last month released its report recognising the high quality we have achieved in our higher education provision.

UCU Edinburgh have raised their concerns over compromised assessment standards and inequality at the University of Edinburgh with the QAA. Many members at Glasgow have raised similar issues within their subjects and schools, but seen them dismissed and are considering raising concerns with the QAA for investigation. Colleagues can’t allow our high standards to be eroded by poorly thought through pressure from senior management and the resultant disastrously implemented attempts to keep the degree press printing.

As management strategies have varied across the university, we ask members and reps to contact us with information they have about compromised academic standards in their subject, along with any evidence you have (including student complaints and appeals and concerns raised by staff in exam boards or by email). Concerns aren’t limited to but might include:

• Assignments being marked by those lacking sufficient specialist expertise, and/or insufficient or inappropriate feedback given to students;
• Appropriateness of decision making around whether dissertations could be considered to meet the threshold for a pass without having been properly marked, or without double marking, or without effective moderation;
• Failure to consider the importance of external examiners withdrawing and to ensure more and more independent internal examiners were present at exam boards to compensate, or failure to accept concerns of external examiners;
• The lack of clarity about whether dissertations subject to the pass threshold check and coursework generally had been properly checked for plagiarism concerns in the absence of proper marking processes;
• Uncertainty about the adequacy of consideration of ‘good cause’ cases and about whether all late penalties were therefore properly and fairly applied;
• The obvious inequalities in marking and moderation procedures applied to students within the same courses and/or within Single and Joint Honours degree programmes to which our courses contribute; inequalities which call into question the fairness and appropriateness all the degree award and classification decisions made at exam boards;
• New centralised moderation processes which circumvented standard moderation procedures;
• In accredited subjects, students graduating without grades in subjects compulsory for professional accreditation, or with marking carried out by unqualified staff.

Dear students,

As your teachers and colleagues at the university, we are writing you at a time of crisis in the higher education sector. As you know, our union, the University and Colleges Union (UCU), is currently undertaking a national marking and assessment boycott. We know many of you are anxious about progression, graduation, and dissertations.

We want to let you know that our action is not aimed at you. We are taking action over years of falling pay rates, increases in workloads, pay inequalities in the sector, and rampant casualisation – where most teaching is now delivered by staff on insecure and short-term contracts.

Our action is exclusively aimed at our employers, and, indeed, resolving this dispute is in the power of Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). But UCEA has walked away from the negotiating table and claims to be unable to afford increases in pay.

This scandal is unfolding as the finances of UK universities show a growing surplus. Our union has calculated that the total income of UK universities is £44.6bn, £3.5bn more than last year, the biggest year on year increase in at least five years.

Meanwhile, the total surplus is £2.6bn, the highest it has been for at least four years. The cash and current investment holdings have reached £19.6bn, £1.3bn more than last year. But staff expenditure is just 51% of income, a record low.

Instead of trying to settle this dispute, managements across the country have docked pay for those participating in industrial action and attempted to keep the ‘degree factory’ going.

The University has reallocated marking and has introduced guidance on a range of new strategies for assessment and calculations of degrees. This guidance has not been made available to all staff or to students but includes major changes to assessment processes and quality standards, such as provision for single marking of dissertations and potential reweighting of courses using partial marks.

Predictably, this has led to many students having their assessments marked by overworked staff without the relevant expertise and knowledge in the subject area, who are trying to meet tight deadlines, just so that graduations can take place. Students have also been issued with degrees with a classification, but with full results pending, or degrees without a final classification. Some have not been issued degrees at all.

Senior management here at the University of Glasgow has also decided to hand out devalued, dodgy degrees, but not to make a public statement with our union saying that the two sides should return to the negotiating table.

With PGR progression and PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. But it is not too late for our senior managers to change course.

We would like to ask you for your support. Our working conditions have been and will be your learning conditions and those of generations to come. Please take to social media and write to our Principal and Vice-Chancellor to demand a fair settlement for staff at the University of Glasgow. Generate and sign petitions of support for your teachers. Appeal your grades where you feel let down – do not feel you need to accept worse. We all deserve better. And solidarity is our strength.

It is with dismay that we read David Duncan’s update on industrial action on 20th June. Instead of genuinely engaging with us, Senior Management prefers to offer statistics. We have our own.

Hundreds of actual staff members, not statistics, have taken part in the boycott, fighting for all of us who have seen our pay cut in real terms year in year out for well over a decade. The latest 5.4% real-terms pay cut (even CPI inflation – never mind the higher RPI – was 10.4% in February when UCEA imposed the 5% pay settlement on UCU members) is just the icing on the cake of the never-ending spiral of worsening pay and conditions for staff in higher education.

Here’s another one – we’ve seen staff (without marking so not on the MAB), whose “official” workload is already well over 110%, being told that they need to do cover marking because it “wasn’t at 120%” (yet!). A 120% workload is a 6-day working week – not as a one off, but as an average over the year – something we thought we had got rid of for good in the early 20th century! We need action on overwork at Glasgow now, not still higher student numbers in 2024/5 and the promise of cake tomorrow in some mythical future utopia.

Meanwhile management’s statistics mask the devaluation of those degrees that are being awarded through marking without full quality assurance by the wrong staff, risking a tsunami of preventable mistakes and appeals, and even compromise of degree accreditation processes. Reports of chaotic exam boards, collective letters by staff members detailing the disregard for academic standards, and external examiners refusing to sign off on the integrity of mitigation processes should be indications of the need for a rethink by SMG.

We are instead told that the sector cannot afford anything but the continuation of the practice – established since 2009 – of making real-terms pay cuts every academic year. In the week after the public learned, many for the first time, about the eye-watering sums being raised by Scottish universities, largely through unsustainable rises in overseas PGT student numbers, such words ring hollow; this is the same strategy that left our students homeless at the start of the year and now UofG proposes to graduate them with IOUs instead of degrees. The “justification” for our senior management’s refusal to encourage compromise is that some universities were not so lucky – but poorer universities like Glasgow Caledonian have publicly called for UCEA to return to negotiations*, so why can’t ours? And the sector negotiation framework in any event allows for individual universities who cannot afford an increase to defer them until they can, so this can’t be used to stop a better sector-wide deal.

With PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. It is not too late for our senior managers to change course. Doing so requires constructive engagement with our branch – working together to promote what would be best for the University of Glasgow and for the sector. We believe the first step along that path is a public commitment to negotiations and a statement that we all believe that the staff who kept the university going through the years of the pandemic deserve better in the context of the biggest cost of living crisis in memory.

UCU’s national Marking and Assessment Boycott is having a significant impact at the University of Glasgow. Despite making initial statements to staff and students claiming the quality of marking and degrees would be upheld, the University’s Senior Management Group has now privately and selectively released a boycott ‘mitigation’ strategy, but not made it public.

We condemn the ‘mitigation’ strategy in the strongest possible terms. In reality, it is not a mitigation strategy, but a strike-breaking strategy that adversely affects students. It undermines their hard work to complete assessments and degrees. We are outraged that senior management prefers to hand out dodgy degrees, rather than work with UCU Glasgow and publicly call for UCEA to return to the national negotiating table.

Senior Management’s initial ‘mitigation’ plan was to bring in alternative markers, seeing staff grade without the relevant expertise and knowledge in the subject area. This in itself undermines the integrity of the marking and feedback process.

Given the effectiveness of the boycott, alternative markers could not cover all the necessary marking and the new ‘mitigation’ strategy outlines processes to progress students with missing marks at exam boards. The guidance outlined in the strategy is unclear in several places and will inevitably be inconsistently applied, resulting in different students receiving different treatment.

The measures outlined in the ‘mitigation’ strategy are detrimental to students and disrespectful of the intense hard work they have put in, particularly in the final year of their degree. As teachers, we know the effort students put into assessments and it is devastating to see them treated as disposable. Additionally, the impact is highly uneven which is unfair to the student body. One student may get a degree, another a dodgy degree and someone else may not get their degree at all despite putting in the same work.

Some degrees might be awarded without the compulsory dissertation or project report component being marked. Projects and dissertations take up to a year of hard work. In some cases staff who are not subject specialists are being used to give pass/fail assessments for dissertations. Staff and external examiners have raised serious concerns, but senior management who have taken over the running of some boards are confirming the grades regardless. They are overriding standard processes to continue a degree factory.

Quorum for exam boards has dropped the requirement for external examiners, who act as an essential external quality assurance check. There is significant risk that downsized exam boards, potentially lacking external examiners and internal examiners with the full range of relevant subject expertise, fail to identify incorrect grades being given to students by inexperienced or markers without the relevant subject expertise. Some externals who have attended exam boards have highlighted these concerns so management are well aware of them.

Students will receive devalued, dodgy degrees so senior management can claim they graduated on time. We are furious at this treatment of students who deserve to have their work fairly graded by the usual specialist staff and to receive the degree they deserve. This could lead to the value of degrees in some areas not being recognised by accreditation bodies and could therefore affect the ability of students to obtain employment.

As we have repeatedly seen this year, University senior management is readily prepared to ignore student welfare and standards, e.g. through over-recruiting and the subsequent accommodation crisis. Now the SMG has now shown it prefers to treat students as a commodity to be moved as fast as possible along a production line, issuing dodgy degrees or not issuing degrees at all, rather than work with UCU to promote a fair settlement. Nonetheless, we remain committed to resolving this ongoing national dispute over real term pay cuts, inequality, casualisation and overwork.

This is our new UCU Glasgow blog – currently still in progress!

February 2020 report into the realities of casualisation at the University of Glasgow available here: UCU Glasgow Annual Casualisation Report 2020

October 2021 report: UCU Glasgow Annual Casualisation Report 2021