This document is an attempt to summarise our success or otherwise of undergraduate teaching in the Division of Life Sciences. At this time of financial difficulty we need to remind ourselves that we already invest much less in teaching than do our competitors – and that this is reflected by external assessments of our competence and of our attractiveness to students.
The 2010 University rankings from The Guardian based on staff-student ratios, expenditure, job prospects and the like are:
UCL ranks 6th over all subjects after Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Warwick and LSE.
UCL ranks 1st, 2nd or 3rd nationally in Archaeology, Architecture, Art & Design, Earth Sciences, English, Law, Modern Languages, Physics and Psychology. The vast majority of UCL subjects are in the top 10 nationwide.
The top 6 nationwide in Biosciences are Cambridge, York, Oxford, Leicester, St Andrews and Imperial.
In contrast, UCL ranks 25th in Biosciences (below Keele, Reading, Ulster, Loughborough, Nottingham Trent and Surrey). Just two other subjects at UCL (Computer Sciences and Mechanical Engineering, both ranking 26th nationally), fall below this level.
Our spend per student in biosciences ranks at 6, while the top six average 9.2
Our student satisfaction is 87%, while the top six average 92%
Our proportion satisfied with feedback is 52% while the top six average 65%
Our student staff ratio in Biosciences is 18.5 while the top six average 10.2
Our average entry tariff is 434 points, while the top six average 466 points. Only one out of the other 15 universities outside the top ten (Durham) has a higher entry demand than we do. Our demand is higher by at least 50 points than anyone below us in the list (and by 100 points than the average of the next six places below us in the list). In other words, we are asking a lot, but delivering little.
One can dismiss these tables as meaningless, but students and parents do not. One might say that the Guardian is biased – but the Times Good University Guide 2010 has almost the same overall top six (Imperial replaces LSE). The Independent/Complete University guide looks very similar.
The Times and the Independent, unlike the Guardian, incorporate RAE score in their assessment, which means that places like Surrey or Nottingham Trent drop out. Both tables then put UCL Biology at no 10. This is scarcely relevant to teaching and in any event still leaves us behind everyone we see as a competitor.
All three tables define Bioscience oddly for they exclude anatomy, and physiology plus pharmacology, each considered as separate categories. UCL is 1st nationwide in Pharmacy & Pharmacology and 2nd in Anatomy & Physiology although we have very few students in degrees so named. They are, on entry, worse than Bioscience students (Anat 395 points; Pharma 411 points compared to 434 for Biosci), but the courses have a better student staff ratio (8 and 9.9: twice as high as Biosciences) and a higher spend (9, compared to 6 for Biosciences).
The lesson is stark: UCL does far less well in teaching biological sciences than almost any other of its subjects, arts or science. We are much further down the national listings than we should be. We demand a lot in terms of entry, but are judged poorly in what we offer. Our staff-student ratio for biological sciences outwith Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology is unfavourable, and in spite of being an affluent institution we spend much less than our competitors on teaching.
If there are to be staff redundancies it is essential that they do not impact on undergraduate teaching. This is a core competency of UCL, is already starved of investment and cannot be allowed to decay even further. If it is, our financial state will in the medium term decline even further. Should the College decide to go down the path of charging a premium fee for undergraduate degrees I predict that our application numbers will collapse when potential students see that they can get a more highly rated teaching experience at a University that charges half as much.
Senior management’s announcement of academic staff cuts in the FLS according to a selection criteria, plus the secretive setting up of an academic redundancy committee by College Council, amounts to a decision to make compulsory redundancies.
There is nothing ‘voluntary’ about this. It’s a way for the deans to hastily force through cuts of £1.5m from the staff salary budget by the end of the financial year. Support staff cuts are soon to be announced, too.
The deans saw our reaction in a Biosciences academic staff meeting on Wednesday 20 Jan: anger and astonishment over cynical plans with a sparse business case. Instead of standing up to defend science and quality teaching, they made it clear they intended to do exactly as they were told by the UCL Provost, finance director and director of human resources.
The FLS cuts are part of the Provost’s £20m cuts program. Both are unnecessary. Both threaten UCL’s reputation.
We are the first academic faculty to be restructured and the first to be hit hard with cuts – but maybe not the last. The Provost’s first major attack on staff was made last term in Information Services Division (ISD), in the form of the ISD Director’s announcement of a restructuring involving 10 compulsory redundancies.
But it was University and College Union (UCU) members across UCL who took a strong, principled position against compulsory redundancies in ISD and across UCL, threatening to ballot for industrial action if necessary. It was that College-wide opposition to the cuts which strengthened ISD union reps’ negotiating hand, enabling them to stop compulsory redundancies. But it was ISD’s UCU members’ researching and campaigning approach which built the required opposition.
That approach has informed our strategy in the FLS. You can improve it, and carry it out, by:
1) joining and recruiting others into UCU, the trade union representing all academic and some support staff at UCL – http://www.ucu.org.uk/join.
2) attending the FLS UCU meeting on 25 Jan, at 1pm in the Darwin Biochemistry lecture theatre, where we’ll debate and decide on our collective response.
2) scrutinising the FLS SMT’s so-called business case. We will use the union’s special legal rights to the FLS and UCL financial accounts. Please contact me or your local rep with any requests for information you’d like the union to make to the FLS deans or the Provost. My email is jesse@biochem.ucl.ac.uk.
3) Work with other UCU members to rally the College-wide support of staff and students by highlighting the damage such job cuts could do to our university and its reputation. Stir and shape the debate around the question these cuts should raise: “What is UCL for?”
In ISD, the new director was found by UCU members to have drastically increased senior management salaries and the use of expensive external consultants for pet projects. He resigned during union negotiations. Our union branch has backed its ISD members all the way. Because of that they are winning their demands to keep their jobs. I hope you will join us in the UCU and participate in building similar pressure on the FLS deans to withdraw their own plans for compulsory redundancies.
Jesse Oldershaw
UCU representative for the Biosciences division of the FLS
jesse@biochem.ucl.ac.uk
JOIN UCU TODAY – http://www.ucu.org.uk/join