Author: L Scott Blankenship

Email sent to members on Monday 30th March 2026

As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we look at accountability procedures for senior leadership and here especially the Vice-Chancellor. Feel free to share this email with non-UCU members in your area.

UoN unveils Strategic Holistic Accountability Model for senior leadership

After listening carefully to staff concerns about accountability, transparency and the apparent absence of consequences at senior level, the University of Nottingham is pleased to announce the Strategic Holistic Accountability Model, a new framework designed to embed a culture of excellence in senior leadership governance.

SHAM will support the delivery of excellence in leadership by demonstrating that senior leaders are appropriately accountable within the institutional framework agreed by senior leadership, as defined by the Board Oversight and Governance for University Strategy model. In doing so, long-established norms of institutional leadership excellence will be safeguarded.

The Vice-Chancellor, who has repeatedly emphasised the importance of accountability, graciously agreed to be the first senior leader reviewed under the pilot process.

Pilot Accountability Reflections: Outcomes, Developments, and Yardsticks

The review panel comprised leading members of the University Executive Board, including several directly associated with the Castle Meadow Campus project. This was widely welcomed as ensuring that the review was informed by those with direct understanding of the decisions under consideration, enabling a self-consistent and well-contextualised interpretation of outcomes aligned with institutional priorities.

The Chair of the panel described the resulting review methodology as both “robustly self-informed” and “appropriately insulated from hindsight.”

Staff Lived Experience

The panel welcomed the Vice-Chancellor’s recent Town Hall clarification regarding the historic “compact” between staff and the University:

“I understand that the compact you felt about working for a university has now been broken. You know, the compact where… you had a secure job for life in a comfortable environment with a low workload.”

Panel members congratulated the Vice-Chancellor on her correction of a persistent misunderstanding within the sector, agreeing that widespread reports of sustained 50–80 hour working weeks were entirely consistent with a low workload when understood within a modern, delivery-focused and outcomes-aligned institutional framework.

The sector’s reliance on discretionary labour, routinely extending far beyond contracted hours, was further welcomed as a significant institutional strength, enabling current levels of activity without the unnecessary constraint of formal workload limits, and as evidence of a mature and high-performing organisational culture, for which the Vice-Chancellor was also commended.

Estates Strategy and Capital Investment

The panel highlighted the University’s £80 million investment in the Castle Meadow project, noting its significance as a major strategic estates initiative of a type unmatched in the UK higher education sector. Particular value was attributed to the insight brought by panel members directly involved in its development and delivery.

While reviewing the Vice-Chancellor’s ongoing management of the project, the panel highlighted the institution’s agile approach to post-acquisition strategy. Earlier reflections that “as we’ve now bought this campus, we need to find a good use for it” were cited as indicative of a flexible, opportunity-led model of capital deployment unburdened by extensive financial modelling or detailed analysis. The Vice-Chancellor was commended for maintaining continuity in this approach.

Student Engagement

The panel welcomed the Vice-Chancellor Q&A sessions as a wholly positive example of student engagement in practice. The introduction of enhanced security measures, including bag searches prior to entry, was commended as helping to place students at ease and create a reassuring environment for constructive dialogue, aligned to UoN’s institutional values. Panel members noted that these arrangements reduced the risk of unstructured contributions and ensured that student voice could be expressed within clearly defined and appropriately controlled parameters, supporting students in developing a clearer understanding of the Vice-Chancellor’s strategic vision.

Rankings and Reputation

The panel also commended the Vice-Chancellor for her continued emphasis on the University’s performance in the QS rankings, noting the strategic advantage of a system in which institutional standing is shaped through targeted engagement with professional networks. This was recognised as a highly efficient mechanism through which universities could enhance their position by actively encouraging participation in reputation surveys, without unnecessary reliance on underlying teaching or research outcomes.

Panel members further observed that traditional academic expectations of methodological rigour and objectivity were of diminishing relevance in this context, with one noting that “the ability of institutions to mobilise their networks to recognise excellence provides a sufficiently robust basis for evaluation.”

The panel recommended that the Vice-Chancellor’s focus on league table performance be further strengthened through the formalisation of a peer engagement framework, Bilateral Academic Collaboration and Knowledge-Sharing through Collegial Recognition And Trusted CHannels, to be rolled out as part of the next QS reputation management process.

Summary of Outcomes and Strategic Forward Positioning

The panel concluded that the Vice-Chancellor had demonstrated strong and consistent leadership across all areas of review, with no material issues identified. The process was widely regarded as a valuable exercise in reinforcing accountability, confirming that existing arrangements remain effective and appropriately aligned with institutional priorities.

No further action was required.

On behalf of the UCU Branch Committee

Email sent to members on Monday 23rd March 2026.

As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we look at one of the central pillars of the “Future Nottingham” strategy: the plan to dramatically increase the University’s student–staff ratio (SSR).

The plan

Nottingham currently operates with a student–staff ratio of about 13:1, broadly in line with other Russell Group universities.

Management’s target is 18–22 students per academic.

For context, no traditional Russell Group university currently operates above about 14.3 on the Guardian dataset. The proposed range would therefore place Nottingham outside the operating norms of research-intensive peers.  

For sure, they will huff and puff about operational SSR vs HESA returns. But no matter how they dress it up, the goal is to get rid of loads of staff that will radically change how this university operates. This is not a marginal efficiency tweak. It is a proposal to run Nottingham on a staffing model that no comparable research university uses.

The miracle metric

SSR is now being treated by management as one of the key tools for “rightsizing” the institution. That is odd, because they themselves recognise that SSR is a very crude metric. It compresses a huge range of academic activity into a single number and ignores things like lab teaching, research buy-outs funded by grants and major disciplinary differences in teaching intensity. Trying to manage a research university using SSR is a bit like running a hospital using the metric “patients per doctor”. Technically measurable. Strategically absurd. Yet this single ratio is now driving decisions about staffing, courses and institutional strategy.

QS Rankings: gravity still applies

One awkward complication with cutting academic staff is that rankings tend to notice. Our December analysis examined what happens to Nottingham’s QS World University Ranking if SSR rises to management’s target range. Even under the most conservative assumptions the result is simple: Nottingham falls well out of the global top 100 – a catastrophe for overseas recruitment.

Once the longer-term effects of reduced research time are included, the projections become much worse:

• Year 2: ~156

• Year 5: ~215

• Year 10: ~240

Universities can choose to shrink their academic workforce. What they cannot do is shrink it and expect rankings to politely ignore the change.

The Guardian table: another disaster 

Domestic league tables are no better. The Guardian ranking gives SSR a 15% weighting, meaning the effect shows up immediately. Our modelling suggests that moving to SSR 20 could push Nottingham from 51st to around the 80s, with more realistic scenarios placing it close to or below 100.   In other words: from the upper half of UK universities to the lower half.

Which matters, because rankings influence where students apply.

The revenue problem

The financial logic behind raising SSR is simple: fewer staff means lower costs.

The problem is that students respond to reputation, rankings and teaching quality — not management spreadsheets. Using established peer reviewed evidence on how Guardian scoring affects applications, we modelled the likely admissions impact.

If SSR rises to 20, the estimated five-year loss in tuition fee income from reduced undergraduate recruitment is roughly £22–27 million.  Push SSR to 22, and the loss rises to around £29–34 million.  And that estimate is conservative. It does not include the full effects of falling QS rankings on international demand. The strategy intended to fix the University’s finances may well damage the revenue base instead.

A final thought

To be clear, the union’s modelling was never presented as a crystal ball. Predicting the precise trajectory of a university over a decade would require a major academic study. Our aim was simply to identify likely trends.  

Those trends are fairly clear. Higher SSR means:

• fewer academics;

• less research time;

• lower rankings;

• weaker student recruitment.

The university says we need to create savings, but what they are really creating is a death spiral.  When a patient cuts their finger, the doctor doesn’t stop the flow of blood by removing the heart.  

This is what our management are doing. 

This is now a fight for the survival of this university. 

You called for a formal dispute back in December, now vote in the UCU ballot.

Save your future and the future of UoN!

                                             On behalf of the UCU Branch Committee

Email sent to Vice Chancellor on 13th March 2026

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

We are writing on behalf of the UCU branch committee regarding remarks made at recent town hall meetings, where you stated:

“Unions declared a vote of no confidence in me and my executive team, and I want to say at the outset, I absolutely understand the motivations of individual union members who have voted for that. I understand that …  the compact you feel about working for a university has now been broken … the compact that you weren’t going to earn very much money, but you had a secure job for life in a comfortable environment without a heavy workload – that’s gone.”

This comment has caused widespread anger and disbelief across the University of Nottingham. Staff understood your remarks as implying that university employees have so far enjoyed a “comfortable environment without a heavy workload”. That characterisation bears no resemblance to the lived reality of working at this institution. Furthermore, the idea of a “job for life” ignores the prevalence of fixed-term contracts among academic staff and the recurring insecurity faced by professional services staff due to repeated restructuring programmes at the University level (e.g. Future Nottingham Phase 1 and Project Transform), within central services, and across Faculties.

Academic and professional services staff have for many years worked under intense pressure and high workloads. Long hours, evening work and weekend commitments are routine. This month colleagues across the university will give up their Saturdays and time with their families in order to run Offer Holder Day events to support recruitment. Such commitments are typical of the dedication staff show to the institution, often well beyond their contracted hours.

The evidence available to both management and unions demonstrates clearly that excessive workload is already a serious issue at the university.

Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (1999), employers are required to take preventative measures against work-related stress. However, UCU formal Health and Safety inspections in 2024, 2025 and 2026 found that these preventative systems are not in place.

The university’s own Management of Work Related Stress Policy (2023) requires Business Unit Stress Risk Assessments to identify and control workplace stressors. Yet UCU inspections found that these assessments have not been carried out, meaning the university is currently non-compliant with its own policy.

Data obtained through a UCU Freedom of Information request (March 2025) further illustrates the scale of the problem:

• Four out of five faculties have average workloads exceeding 100%.

• 7,420 days of sickness absence between September 2023 and March 2024 were recorded as resulting from work-related stress.

• 37 occupational health referrals for work-related stress were recorded between September 2023 and February 2025.

Our own casework also shows rising levels of workload-related stress, including colleagues experiencing severe mental health impacts and ongoing legal cases relating to excessive workload.

In this context, suggesting that staff previously worked in a “comfortable environment without a heavy workload” is both inaccurate and deeply offensive to colleagues who are already working beyond sustainable limits.

These remarks come at a time when morale at the University of Nottingham is extremely low and confidence in senior leadership has collapsed, as demonstrated by the recent vote of no confidence passed overwhelmingly by members of all three unions and initiated by rank and file staff from across campus. Comments of this kind reinforce the widespread perception that the realities faced by staff are not understood by university leadership.

We therefore call on you to issue a public apology to staff for these remarks. Recognising the commitment and workload of staff would be an important first step towards rebuilding trust.  

Staff at the University of Nottingham continue to work extraordinarily hard for their students, their research and the institution as a whole. That commitment deserves recognition and respect.

We will be sharing this letter with our members and with members of University Council.

Yours sincerely,

UCU Branch Committee

University of Nottingham

Email sent to members on Monday 16th March 2026.

As part of our fight to protect jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails outlining various aspects of our campaign. Today, we discuss UEB’s decision to suspend a whole range of degree programmes and how this violated the university’s governance processes. Further details about our campaign can be found on our webpages, via the Future Nottingham tab.

The University of Nottingham’s Course Suspensions: Two Claims That Don’t Hold Up

The University has offered a public justification for its decision to suspend over 40 courses, including the whole departments of Modern Languages and Music. Here is why some of those justifications deserve a closer look.

Claim 1: “Our governance processes are being followed across all the [Future Nottingham] programme, including the decision to suspend courses.”

What happened? Heads of Schools were informed of the decision approximately a week before staff were notified on 5 November 2025. The courses were taken off UCAS by 7 November. And as for the “two main bodies […] involved in the governance of the University”, Senate and Council, the former was invited to comment on 13 November, while the latter only voted to approve the strategic case for change on 25 November.

On governing processes, it might be worth looking at the University’s Quality Manual, as a “robust quality assurance framework which sets out the regulations, policies and procedures around teaching and learning at the University of Nottingham.”

Section 4.1 on closing or suspending a course is unambiguous: “School and Faculty endorsement is required to close or suspend a course”  (emphasis added). That is mandatory language, not aspirational. It also specifies that “at the end of this stage there must be clear evidence of support from both the School and the Faculty” and that this evidence “must be retained for audit purposes”.

Heads of Schools were informed but not asked. Notification isn’t endorsement. The Quality Manual does not state that Schools should be kept in the loop, but that their support should be sought and evidenced before the process moves forward.

Now, the University Executive Board (UEB) may contend that Future Nottingham, as a top-down executive programme, operates outside or above the Quality Manual framework. However, this argument does not hold either.

The Quality Manual states that “all closures and suspensions […] will require endorsement at School and Faculty level” (emphasis added). It contains no exception for strategic restructuring programmes, nor any provision allowing UEB to disapply its requirements.

The logic of a “top-down” decision superseding the Quality Manual also defeats itself. Its stated purpose is indeed to:

• Enable the effective and efficient monitoring of academic standards and the quality of the student experience in relation to internal priorities and external requirements (such as those stated in the QAA’s Quality Code   and from accrediting professional, statutory and regulatory bodies);
• Ensure consistency and transparency, whilst enabling and acknowledging appropriately diverse discipline practices;
• Provide a mechanism for critical review and, in doing so, highlight and promote good practice across the institution.

The endorsement requirement has its greatest value precisely in situations like this one: where an executive decision is being imposed on Schools that have not asked for it, and where the outcome of following the procedure would have been a documented objection. The University bypassed a mechanism that would have produced a formal, recorded refusal to endorse. That is not a procedural technicality. It is a substantive governance failure.

Claim 2: “This decision was made to ensure compliance with Consumer Protection Legislation (CMA) as well as to ensure transparency to potential future students and not promote programmes that may ultimately not exist. No final decisions have been made about the future of these courses.”

This argument, repeated on many occasions, deserves closer reading.

The University says, in two sentences, that it removed courses from UCAS to avoid promoting programmes that “may ultimately not exist”, and that “no final decisions have been made.” If no final decision has been made, then these are courses that may well continue to exist. Removing them from UCAS, therefore, does not protect prospective students from applying to closing courses. It deprives them of the chance to apply to courses that the University itself admits might survive.

That is not a consumer protection measure. It is the operational implementation of a decision that has not yet been taken.

Furthermore, the CMA requires that prospective students be given “clear, intelligible, unambiguous and timely information by HE providers”. Thus, transparency, according to CMA, is telling people what’s happening, not suddenly withdrawing options without explanation. If the University’s genuine concern was transparency, the appropriate step would have been to add a visible notice to the relevant course pages explaining that these programmes were under review. Instead, the courses disappeared.

There is also the matter of the withdrawal date. The University’s public communication of 6 November told students that courses would be suspended from UCAS from Monday 10 November. They were, in fact, removed on Friday 7 November, without correction or explanation.

Other than a misleading public statement, it undermines the University’s CMA compliance argument. The University’s statement claimed that the suspension was made in the interests of transparency and CMA compliance. It is very difficult to maintain that position while simultaneously having communicated an incorrect withdrawal date to the public. This was either an administrative error or a deliberate choice. If it was an error, it demonstrates inadequate control over a consequential operational decision. If it was deliberate, it raises the question of who made that decision, on what authority, and why the public communication was not corrected before the earlier withdrawal took effect.

All in all

These two claims share a common thread: they assert compliance and good faith while the documented sequence of events tells a different story. Governance procedures were bypassed or substituted with lesser forms of engagement. A withdrawal date was communicated incorrectly.

The University said that no final decisions have been made. If that is true, there is still time to act consistently with it, by reinstating the courses on UCAS pending the September 2026 decision.

The students, staff, and communities affected by these decisions are entitled to more than statements of reassurance. They are entitled to governance that matches the commitments set out in the University’s own documentation and to an institution that, when it makes claims about compliance, can demonstrate them.

                UoN UCU Branch Committee