Author: UCU Nottingham

Email sent to members on Tuesday 5th May 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 present a range of views on management’s strategy by students, staff and members of the wider public. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

Put The Clocks Forward not back … Future Nottingham is management’s pipe dream. Students and staff feel we need an effective counterproposal with real expressive consultation.The university needs to consult with all of its staff and stakeholders to find the right solution: don’t ignore the people who care about your future!

Last week, I went to University Park campus and the Medical School. I spoke to fifty people: members of the public, home and overseas graduates, postgraduates. Post doctoral, pre university Nottingham College students, our lovely professional and academic staff. I asked them if they’d heard about the university management plan and the university staff’s counterproposal to save the university’s financial security. It was clear that everyone had heard about the cuts, the redundancies past, present and possibly future, but it was obvious that no-one felt the university had really taken the time to engage with staff about alternatives. No-one thought that this essential democratic process had been seriously undertaken.

Members of the public – husband and wife going into lakeside cafe: ‘yes, we’ve heard, we’re shocked. Music particularly, especially when the government is putting so much into the curriculum and music.’

Teacher: ‘I teach in a primary school, moving the university to a much more enriching curriculum is vital. I’ll read the staff’s counterproposal.’

Catering staff: ‘I have friends who work here and they’re still recovering after the terrible attacks on the students and the caretaker, nothing like that had ever happened before, yes I’ll read the counterproposal.’

Medical student: ‘we need openness and use the knowledge of staff. I have real fears about the data that’s being used to make decisions, it feels unsafe.’ 

Music, Post Doctoral researcher: ‘It’s the isolation of not knowing whether you matter, whether your aspirations matter.’

Undergraduate music student: ‘I want to make a career in music. I’d heard that the government is investing in music and felt hopeful. I’ll read the staff’s counterproposal.’

Academic: ‘I honestly would never have thought about union membership, but I really feel now I have to join. We have to help the senior management to properly assess our counterproposal. They really think they have the data, but they don’t.’

Academic: ‘Our working life and right to be here is challenged (most recent harm is the new convoluted gateway into journal access) it feels as if we’re all being made migrant here, constant changing of the rules of engagement. I ask who and what is a university for?’

Professional Services: ‘Future Nottingham is also future health of Nottingham, the UK and the wider world how they all join up; to me it’s the loss of the public service and accountability to the people we have always felt we serve, the wider public health impact through lowering productivities, quality of service what year on year on cuts do to motivation, purpose and the meaning of a life. We need proper consultation on the counterproposal that we spent time preparing.’

Academic: ‘I think it’s because of the hit and run nature of cuts in previous years: none of the previous cuts, changes, charges against a questionable compound annual growth rate have been demonstrated as a real purpose. We sit in a place that although historically it has coherence, purpose and underlying support from the widest possible communities it’s as if it’s all the kind of hippy mess that the vice chancellor poked at when she implied the silliness of thinking you had a fairly low paid job for life in the realpolitik of financialisation. But we’re not contractors, we’re not consultants: no-one has even had the time to work on an appropriate educational user interface for Unicore that makes us feel as if we’re working in a university.’

Management’s Future Nottingham Phase 2 plans clearly have no support—from staff, students, or the wider public.

There is always an alternative. Read the UCU’s counterproposal, its report to Council!

Come to the rally tomorrow, Wednesday 6 May, at 10.30 a.m., South side of Trent Building. Let’s make sure that Council hears our voices!

Email sent to members on Monday 20th April 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 look at the implications of missing Equality Impact Assessments for staff. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

When Equality Becomes an Afterthought: EIA Failures and What They Mean for Us All

Across the sector, we are seeing rapid institutional change: course closures, workload intensification, restructuring, and cuts to resources. At the University of Nottingham, Future Nottingham is steamrolling a number of cuts and proposed cuts: 48 courses; high staff student ratios; the Hopper Bus service; journal access; office cleaning, to name just a few.  But alongside the pace and scale of change, something critical is being quietly sidelined: equality.

Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) are not optional extras. They are a legal requirement under the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), designed to ensure that institutions actively consider how decisions affect people with protected characteristics. In theory, EIAs should be a safeguard against discrimination. In practice, they are increasingly absent, incomplete, or superficial.

Our local tracking of EIA compliance reveals a deeply concerning pattern:

• Major structural changes – including increases in student-staff ratios, reductions in research time, and cuts to services – are being presented in the Business Case to Council on 6 May with no completed EIAs.
• Where EIAs do exist (for example, course suspensions – the only one UCU has seen to date), they are partial and limited, focusing narrowly on students while ignoring impacts on staff.
• In some cases, decisions (journal access; office cleaning) have already been made and implemented months before any EIA is completed, raising serious questions about whether equality considerations are being meaningfully applied at all.

This is not a technical oversight. It is a systemic failure.

Why EIAs Matter

EIAs are meant to ensure that institutions have ‘due regard’ to three core aims:

1. Eliminating discrimination
2. Advancing equality of opportunity
3. Fostering good relations

When EIAs are missing or inadequate, these duties are not being met. And the consequences are not abstract.

• Increasing student-staff ratios disproportionately affects staff with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and those already managing high workloads.
• Reductions in research time may deepen existing inequalities in promotion and progression, particularly for women and minoritised staff.
• Cuts to services (like libraries, transport, and cleaning) can have uneven impacts across different groups, including disabled staff and students.

Without proper EIAs, these impacts remain invisible – and therefore unchallenged.

The Problem of ‘Tick-Box’ Equality

Even where EIAs are produced, there is a growing concern that they function as a tick-box exercise rather than a meaningful process.

A basic or retrospective EIA – especially one that only considers a subset of those affected – does not meet the standard of ‘due regard.’ Equality must be considered before decisions are made, not after they are implemented.

What we are seeing instead is a hollowing out of equality processes:

• EIAs completed late (or not at all)
• Narrow framing of who counts (students but not staff)
• Lack of evidence or engagement with unions and affected groups

This undermines both the spirit and the letter of the law.

What Can Be Done?

There are several routes for challenging EIA failures:

1. Internal challenge

Members can:

• Request EIAs and supporting evidence
• Raise concerns through formal structures (e.g. committees, grievances)
• Push for transparency around decision-making (ask to see meeting notes, where the EIA was discussed)

2. External escalation

Where internal processes fail, issues can be escalated to bodies such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has powers to investigate and enforce compliance.

3. Legal routes

In some cases, decisions made without proper equality consideration can be challenged through judicial review. Importantly, such challenges must be made promptly.

A Collective Responsibility

EIA failures are not just procedural issues – they are about whose voices are heard, whose experiences are recognised, and whose wellbeing is prioritised.

For UCU members, this is a collective concern. Equality is not a separate agenda from workload, job security, or working conditions – it is embedded within them. When equality processes fail, it is often the most vulnerable colleagues who bear the brunt.

We need to:

• Keep documenting and evidencing these failures (contact us/your local rep and let us know)
• Continue raising them through union structures
• Build collective pressure for transparency and accountability

Because equality should not be an afterthought. It should be at the heart of every decision our institution make.

If you have concerns about EIAs in your area, please get in touch with your UCU rep. Together, we can ensure that equality is not sidelined through Future Nottingham.

                              On behalf of the UCU branch committe