Email sent to members on Wednesday 3rd 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,
Email sent to members on Monday 1st June.
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 so-called Consultation of the Future Nottingham draft business plan. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
It’s not a Consultation. It’s a Countdown!
The University of Nottingham is not going under. Let’s be clear about that from the start. University Park is lovely, the buildings are still standing, the endowment is intact, and the vice-chancellor’s and senior management’s salaries remain comfortably unthreatened. What is happening with “Future Nottingham” is not a rescue, but a choice to pursue an excessively large financial surplus that will be used for more grand capital schemes. But nothing comes for free and this particular choice requires staff, students, and the wider city of Nottingham to pay for it!
Over 2,700 more members of staff have now received redundancy notices. Physics, Chemistry, Music, Languages and Medicine to name but a few areas are heavily “in scope”. Departments built over decades by people who dedicated their careers to this institution are being lined up for closure. And the university calls for a “Consultation”. So, let’s talk about the “C” word …
“Consultation”, by any reasonable definition, involves listening. It implies some reasonable possibility that you don’t know everything and might be persuaded otherwise. But when a detailed alternative proposal was submitted by unions months ago and management refused to even read it, the pretence collapsed. Receiving a redundancy notice is not an invitation to a conversation. It is a statement of intent dressed up in the language of HR process. The decision, it seems, has already been made and the “consultation” is a necessary formality that heralds the countdown to a lesser university.
University management continually say that doing nothing is not an option. And they are right but only in the narrowest, most self-serving sense. What options have UoN management elected for? Spending millions on management consultants while cutting teaching staff is an option. Pursuing aggressive surplus targets overseen by the same committee responsible for a string of failed capital projects is an option. These are choices, and the people making them should own them and take responsibility but they don’t.
So here we are again, sacrificing wages and careers with ASOS, strike and MAB because we actually care for the University of Nottingham. Meanwhile the university had the audacity to express disappointment that industrial action is causing stress to students at a difficult time of year. What peculiar kind of logic is it that asks workers to quietly absorb job losses and course closures out of consideration for students, while the University Executive Board responsible for the disruption escapes scrutiny and accountability? Staff did not arrive at this moment willingly. We arrived here because 350 jobs were cut last year and hundreds more are now at risk. It’s because it’s the same old UEB that, whilst telling us we’re not wanted anymore, thinks nothing of blowing nearly £100M on the failed Castle Meadow Campus without doing as much as the due diligence you’d do before trying a new flavour of crisps, and because every other avenue has been exhausted.
The disruption students face this summer is real, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But the disruption that will follow if FN goes ahead is of an entirely different order. Pastoral support teams and “mental health apps”, however well-intentioned, cannot replace courses that no longer exist, a supervisor who has been made redundant, or a department that has been quietly wound down. No procedure fixes the absence of a physics lab or a music department. And here is perhaps the most important point of all: The students who will suffer most from these cuts are not yet at the University of Nottingham. They are teenagers sitting in school classrooms right now, imagining their futures, researching university courses. They will look at what Nottingham chose to become, and they will choose somewhere else. The reputational damage being done today will echo for a generation.
The University of Nottingham became a great civic institution because of the people who work within it; researchers, lecturers, technicians and support staff. Asset-stripping that human infrastructure to fund foolhardy balance sheet targets is not a strategy, no matter how much management consultant “speak” one uses. It’s a slow, careless, one-dimensional demolition job that highlights the extent to which management are out of their depth.
Isn’t it time that UEB stopped floundering around and instead for the first time in many years meaningfully listened to the people who actually know how to make this university work? Without a new era of trust in staff no amount of management consultancy fees can ever rebuild what is being lost. And no amount of “consultation” can hide the fact that “Future Nottingham” is actually a costly, chaotic, countdown to Failure Nottingham. Grow up UEB and let the adults enter the room!
Email sent to members on Friday 29th May. Zoom link removed for security.
Hi all,
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:
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,
Email sent to members on Wednesday 27th May. Zoom link removed for security.
Dear members,
We’re inviting you to a members meeting at 2pm on Monday 1st of June. We wanted to update you on how the consultation process is going on, but also have a space to discuss industrial action.
As you will have seen, in addition to calling a marking and assessment boycott (MAB) from May 20, UoN UCU has also called strike action from June 1. The strike action was called in response to our employer threatening 100% pay deductions for staff who take part in the MAB. Why did we feel we had to do this? The point is that a MAB is not a strike. Crazy as it may seem, that means an employer can deduct all of your pay for taking in a MAB and still expect you to come to work. Legally, you cannot refuse to come to work in these circumstances without running the risk of being fired. To safely stay away from work entirely, you have to be on strike, not just on a MAB.
Naturally, we think this is ridiculous. We don’t believe any of our members should be required to work for free. The only way for us to mitigate this was to call a parallel strike, alongside the MAB. This now allows members taking part in a MAB to stay away from work if they wish by simultaneously striking. Members who have no marking and assessment at this time, and are therefore unable to MAB and have no need to take part in a parallel strike, should consider if they would be better off donating generously to the solidarity fund to help sustain the action of others. Details on how to donate are given below.
We can explain more at the members meeting and can also answer any questions you might have. We would also strongly encourage you to speak to your rep and colleagues in your area as we know industrial action works best when carried out collectively like this.
In solidarity as always,
Donations can be made via bank transfer to:
UCU Nottingham LA63 Hardship Fund
Account number: 20346359
Sort code: 60-83-01
Reference: Solidarity 2026
Email sent to members on Tuesday 26th May 2026. Zoom link removed for security reasons.
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 recent approval of contingency regulations by Senate. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
Contingency regulations approved – we are prepared!
On Thursday, 21 May the Senate of the University approved contingency regulations, which will allow management to award students ‘part for whole’ marks. The result was very narrow, 49 in favour of approval, 45 against.
Apparently, several Heads of School spoke up for approval in the interest of students. They could not have been more wrong. When the contingency regulations were initially applied during Covid 19 in 2020, all universities across the country were in the same situation. It was normal that students graduated without a full set of marks. This time it is different. While students elsewhere will graduate normally, UoN students will receive incomplete degrees. Considering the additional drop in UoN’s reputation, the degree won’t be worth the paper it is printed on. If management really wanted to protect students, it would come to its senses, drop its course of savage job cuts and agree with UCU on a way forward, which would allow restructuring without job cuts and without disadvantaged students.
The story remains the same. It is not just staff, who are threatened by this management’s latest folly. It is equally students who are going to suffer. As management intends to teach the same amount of students with 700 fewer staff, the consequences are obvious. Following Phase 1 of Future Nottingham, there are already fewer staff available to assist students. Now their plan is to increase class sizes drastically and contact time with over-stretched and over-worked staff will decline further.
But perhaps more importantly, if staff don’t take this action and force management to backtrack on its disastrous plans, the students will be the ones who pay the biggest price. This is because Nottingham will transition to a very different uni that is no longer research led and no longer top tier. The value of a Nottingham degree will rapidly decline. Today’s students have worked hard to get into a ‘top’ university. They deserve their degree to retain its long term value on their CVs. If the VC and others get their way, that won’t happen. This is an existential fight, not just for jobs, but for the future identity of UoN
For us as UCU members, we have always known that approval of the contingency regulations was highly likely. And indeed, management had prepared for the eventuality that Senate was rejecting the contingency regulations. A meeting of Council had been arranged for the same evening to override Senate, should the result have not been to management’s liking.
Approving the regulations is, however, one thing. Implementing them in practice is another. As we know, management simply has not got the capacity necessary for implementation. Too many people have been made redundant over the past two years, almost 300 colleagues in 2024, followed by another 350 in 2025. As long as we stay the course and continue with the MAB, graduations in summer remain threatened as will progression between years. This significant disruption remains the best tool available for bringing management back into negotiations. If the Vice Chancellor wishes for the disruption to cease, she knows precisely what to do.
If you have MAB related questions or are looking for a collective space of solidarity, remember today’s Zoom coffee from 12 noon to 1 p.m. at
Solidarity!
