Month: June 2026

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Picnic today to move online

Email sent to members on Thursday 11th June 2026. Zoom link removed for security.

Hi All

The reclaim your lunch break picnic planned for this lunchtime will be moving online due to the weather. Join us on zoom with your lunch for a chat 12-1pm today

See you soon,

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Member meeting Jun 15th 1pm

Email sent to members on Tuesday 9th June 2026. Zoom link removed.

Dear members,

Next Monday 15th June at 1pm we will hold a branch meeting for all members on Zoom (link below). The agenda for the meeting is to discuss the progress of our dispute, and to vote on the attached motion submitted by a member. 

The widespread and sustained commitment to the Marking and Assessment Boycott we are seeing reported is hugely significant and a certain cause of considerable disruption. Whilst the university has elected to plan for the use of contingency regulations to attempt to mitigate the MAB, it is important for members to remember this is not a simple throwing of a switch, but a complex and time-consuming process that gets more complex and more time consuming the greater the participation in the MAB. In other words, your action continues to be impactful. Keep going everyone, as this is how we win! 

In anticipation of our branch meeting next week and conscious of the impact of our united action through the MAB and strikes, your branch committee have this week written to the Vice Chancellor to once again emphasise that we are ready to negotiate. If management agree to talk and offer anything meaningful, the committee will of course bring this to members’ meeting next week for your consideration. If they do not make an offer, there will be an update of what we have proposed and what steps we can take to up the pressure on management to get serious and start talking. 

In solidarity,

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‘I wasn’t going to do the MAB. Then this happened’!

Email sent to members on Monday 8th June 2026.

As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails, authored by different UCU members, examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we discuss the reasons for, and the importance of, participating in the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

‘I wasn’t going to do the MAB. Then this happened’

Full disclosure: I wasn’t going to do the marking and assessment boycott.

My reasons were many, and they included the following:

  • I don’t teach many Finalists, mainly first years. My participation in the Mab achieves not a great deal.
  • I don’t want the University to take my money; I want my money for me.
  • Also re money: I am probably being made redundant. A couple months’ pay takes on a greater significance in this context.
  • My students this year have been through enough. From finding out in the middle of the semester that their department is closing and their lecturers being made redundant, to being invited to a meeting in which their bags were searched and they were told that the university would rather welcome ‘higher tariff’ students, they have been through enough nonsense. Do I want to risk contributing to any more disruption to their year?
  • And also, I really quite fancy actually marking their work.

I genuinely want to reward those students who turned up and did well. The thought of them getting some derived mark, based on their performance in, what, January? – when every good teacher knows that the rate of learning and accomplishment on a project is not the same at the end as it is near the beginning or the middle – is unappealing.

So I wasn’t going to do the MAB. And then I changed my mind.

It wasn’t just the redundancy letter, and it wasn’t seeing the shock on the faces of colleagues who were seeing the pool numbers and understanding the implications for the first time. No, it was that Wednesday 13th May, the day full of meetings. The FN2 presentation that was riddled with errors (‘Oh, that’s actually wrong on there’, muttered the presenter when reading off the slide, as if encountering it for the first time).

It was also things like seeing that not only are Modern Languages degrees going, the Language Centre is apparently now going too. We had always been assured that, yes, we are still a global university, and no, we are not destroying language provision in the East Midlands. We are keeping the Language Centre. We are keeping the Language Centre. This was always the response from above to concerns voiced by supporters. Now it seems that this is no longer the case. It was seeing how management had, apparently, changed their mind on that one. (See? See how easy it is to change one’s mind?)

And it was the suggestion, from the presenter, that we all ‘Take the time’ to digest all this and take it all in. (‘Take the time’?)

Coming out of the day of meetings, I overheard two colleagues talking about the MAB. ‘I just hope everyone does it this time’, I heard a friend say.

And by that stage, I knew I was going to do the MAB:

  • No, I don’t teach Final year students but I can still participate in the MAB.
  • If colleagues are losing money on my behalf, then I don’t want the money either. I can earn more money later. I will gladly accept an unpaid sabbatical.
  • Actually, my students understand. I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of students who have reached out to say thank you for the work we did this year, and who took the opportunity to say how sorry they are about what’s happening. (Many students have gone above and beyond. To the students who curated the Endangered Species exhibition to draw attention to programme closures: thank you! To the students who have asked their lecturers not to mark their work – thank you.) The students, who are aware of what’s going on, do get it.
  • And our branch has a track record of getting things done, and doing them well. The summer when there was that big push against casualisation was the summer the university created a number of permanent jobs to ward off the bad press. The summer when we got our pensions back and everyone got a £500 bonus. Branch action contributed to nudging those things along.

What the last few weeks really have shown me is that what’s happening now is bigger than my job, bigger even than the jobs of everyone doing the MAB. We don’t need to take action for our own sakes. But we want to act with integrity, and this is a chance for that. And it’s a reminder that it’s never too late to change your mind.

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UCU APM Meeting on FN2 Counterproposals today 11:30

Email sent to members on 4th June 2026. Zoom link removed for security.

Hi all,

A reminder about todays meeting at 11:30!

We’ve not had an proper APM meeting to discuss the FN2 work so if you are APM and under threat of redundancy or are affected by the College structure changes please come along or feel free to email me concerns I can always speak separately.

Hopefully we can sort out where we are covering these areas in our response:

  • APM School/Faculty Operations Manager roles
  • Health and Safety roles
  • EDI roles
  • APM 2-5 roles not directly made redundant but role changes expected
  • Anything else of concern related to APM roles

Topics covered will be areas such as queries around role changes, pooling/VR/CR, and counterproposal responses both more general in the approach and specific to types of roles.

If anyone is interested in helping write UCU counterproposals for APM specific areas more directly, please come along or let me know.

Thanks