Author: L Scott Blankenship

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

Email sent to members on Monday 9th 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 the role of the Chair of Council Sir Keith O’Nions in the university’s financial debacle. Further details about our campaign can be found on our webpages, via the Future Nottingham tab.

Sir Keith O’Nions – Engendering Decline

The Council of the University of Nottingham plays a key role in the development of the institution. As it is highlighted on the university website, ‘University Council is a key component of the University’s governance structure, critiquing, debating and ratifying decisions which shape the future of the University. Council plays a critical role in challenging University decisions, influencing strategy and supporting the work of the University’s Executive Board which is made up of a small group of executive colleagues.’

Sir Keith O’Nions has been the Chair of Council since January 2020.

When the pandemic struck in Spring 2020, the University of Nottingham (UoN) experienced financial difficulties, which required drastic action. All non-essential spending was immediately suspended, a voluntary redundancy scheme resulted in the loss of more than 400 members of staff, and fixed-term and postgraduate teaching posts were terminated. In June/July 2020, budget cuts of 15 per cent were imposed on all faculties for the subsequent academic year.

In March 2021, the local University and College Union (UCU) branch presented its Alternative Financial Strategy (AFS). We pointed out that unless university management changed its lean financial management strategy, in which long-term infrastructure projects are exclusively financed through annual surpluses while cash reserves are being kept low, a similar situation was likely to re-occur a few years down the line.

Importantly, we contacted Sir Keith O’Nions at the time and asked him to circulate our financial alternative in Council. Nevertheless, the Chair of Council, responsible for the oversight of UoN finances, refused to do so. ‘The Chair and Council’, we were told, ‘are both fully apprised of, and have complete confidence in, the financial positioning of the University and require no additional external input’ (17 June, 2021).

Only a few months later, Council with Sir Keith O’Nions at its helm authorised the purchase of Castle Meadow Campus (CMC). It approved the initial acquisition cost of £37.5 million, i.e. Phase 1, and an additional £47m + vat, i.e. £54 million funding envelope, i.e. Phase 2, for a 10-year development plan, i.e. £91.5 million overall.

Senate, the only partly democratic institution within the university’s governance structure, pointed out that CMC was not fit for purpose as it did not have enough teaching rooms for a start. Instead of listening to reason, the Chair of Council together with the former Registrar stepped in and disempowered Senate through a change in its statutes.

Unsurprisingly, with the same financial strategy in place, by the end of 2023, the University was facing financial difficulties again. An immediate hiring freeze and non-pay savings were combined with a Mutually Agreed Resignation Scheme (MARS), which resulted in the ‘voluntary’ redundancy of almost 300 staff in June 2024.

And still, the University of Nottingham with Sir Keith O’Nions as its Chair of Council soldiered on regardless. More money was invested in CMC and the financial model remained the same. In early 2025 it became finally clear that more drastic action had to be taken to keep the university afloat. Management finally accepted that CMC was not fit for purpose, estimating that it may have to sell it for no more than £14.5 million. Heads did roll. The term of the VC Shearer West was not renewed, the Registrar Paul Greatrix and the Chief Financial Officer Margaret Monckton both had to leave. However, Sir Keith O’Nions as Chair of Council stayed on.

Future Nottingham, a grand restructuring plan, was put forward. Phase 1 resulted in the loss of 350 mainly administrative staff through ‘voluntary redundancies’, Phase 2 is likely to cause further redundancies of hundreds of staff, this time mainly academics and technicians. A host of study programmes are earmarked for closure, higher staff-student ratios are intended to teach more students with fewer staff. And yet again, it is Sir Keith O’Nions, who ensured that the Strategic Case for Change was pushed through Council in November 2025.

In sum, it was Sir Keith O’Nions, who ensured that the purchase of Castle Meadow Campus was waived through Council back in 2021. It was he, who refused to share the Alternative Financial Strategy 1.0, produced by UCU, with members of Council. It was he who, together with the former Registrar, engineered the disempowerment of Senate. It is he who is currently driving the disastrous Future Nottingham restructuring programme. He is in many respects one of the key architects of the university’s current mess.  

It is Sir Keith O’Nions who has engendered deline! No wonder that members of all three campus unions included him in their Vote of No Confidence.

On behalf of the UCU Branch Committee