Tag: 2026 redundancy campaign blog

Email sent to members on Wednesday 1st July 2026. Zoom details redacted for security.

Dear UCU members,

First, please remember today’s members’ meeting at 11.30 a.m. If there is a new, improved offer by management resulting from this morning’s dispute resolution meeting, we will hold another vote. The Zoom details are as follows:

REDACTED

Second 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 have another, more light-hearted intervention. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

A Bold New Era for Nothingham United FC

By Nigel Stratton-Worthington, Senior chief football strategist. 

At Nothingham United FC, we have always believed that football clubs must look beyond the narrow, outdated objective of winning football matches. While some organisations remain trapped in twentieth-century thinking, obsessing over league position, trophies, player recruitment and other legacy metrics, we have embraced a modern vision focused on sustainability, transformation and property acquisition.

This journey began with our landmark purchase of the Central Plaza Retail Complex. Critics questioned why a football club with an existing club shop, a successful online store, and merchandise sales across multiple channels would require a large city-centre retail development. The answer is simple: Vision.

Unfortunately, after purchasing the complex and investing heavily in renovations, club-branded décor, executive suites, strategic consultation exercises and a state-of-the-art stakeholder engagement atrium, we discovered that we had rather less money than anticipated. Some observers have described the resulting £65 million loss as “catastrophic.” We prefer the term “transformational.”

Indeed, the true measure of leadership is not avoiding expensive mistakes but responding boldly once they have occurred. Consequently, the Board commissioned a comprehensive review of club operations. This revealed a troubling statistic: our Spectator-to-Staff Ratio (SSR) was below target.

Naturally, this finding demanded immediate action. Some traditionalists suggested increasing spectator numbers. Others proposed improving team performance. A few extremists even advocated investing in players. However, careful analysis demonstrated that reducing staff numbers would be significantly easier.

Accordingly, we have launched Project Lean Pitch. The principle is straightforward. Every employee contributes equally to football operations. Whether an individual is a first-team striker, goalkeeper, groundskeeper, academy coach, bus driver or tea-room assistant, each count as precisely one member of staff. This robust methodology allows us to identify efficiencies wherever they exist. Importantly, senior management have been excluded from consideration. As the review concluded, strategic leadership is critical to the future success of the club and therefore cannot be reduced. The same regrettably cannot be said for centre-backs.

Following extensive modelling, we have determined that the optimal football squad consists of eight players. This represents a significant efficiency gain over the previous, wasteful eleven-player model. While some have raised concerns regarding FIFA regulations, positional coverage and basic geometry, we believe these objections reflect an outdated attachment to conventional football thinking. Indeed, our modelling shows that fewer players will create exciting opportunities for innovation, agility and personal resilience. Each remaining player will gain valuable experience covering multiple positions simultaneously. This aligns perfectly with our commitment to professional development.

The financial savings generated through these measures will enable investment in several strategic priorities. Most notably, we are delighted to announce plans for a new Executive Wellness and Leadership Medical Centre. The facility will feature private treatment rooms, a strategic recovery suite, leadership resilience pods and an inspirational glass atrium celebrating our transformation journey. Healthy leadership is vital during periods of change.

As for supporters concerned about the future of the first team, I would encourage them to focus on the bigger picture. Football matches come and go. League tables fluctuate. Relegation is temporary. But retail property acquisitions, strategic transformation programmes and executive wellness infrastructure create lasting value. That is why Nothingham United FC remains committed to delivering sustainable excellence for generations to come. Results on the pitch are, of course, only one measure of success. And fortunately, not one we plan to monitor.

             On behalf of the Branch Committee

Email sent to members on Monday 22nd 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 enormous toll that management’s restructuring plans and simple incompetence have taken on staff. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.

I’ve been employed in my role here for less than a year. So far Nottingham have accidently sacked me, put me at risk of redundancy, and potentially lost my personal data to cybercriminals. 

Just over a year ago I was about to graduate with my PhD and start what I thought was my dream job. I felt so lucky to have quickly secured a permanent academic post at a Russell Group University and was excited for the year ahead. 

Since then, the University of Nottingham have accidently sacked me, put me at risk of redundancy, and potentially lost my personal data to cybercriminals.

Back in September 2025, during the first week of teaching, I received an email telling me that my account was going to be closed that evening, as I was leaving the University. This email arrived shortly before 3pm in the afternoon, just I was heading into a medical appointment. I had no idea what this was about, and as a new member of staff, was somewhat panicked that there may have been an issue with my contract. 

It was not until the next day, when I managed to get hold of HR on the phone, that I learned there had been a mistake in the system, and I had incorrectly been processed as a leaver. I was told that they ‘thought’ they could reverse this, and without it affecting my tax, as ‘fortunately’ we had just entered a new pay cycle. To be fair, at this point the University did confirm with me almost immediately that the leavers process had been reversed, and I was back on my account later that day. However, it was not until several months later that it was confirmed that my tax had not been impacted, and as a new member of staff, the whole ordeal had quite an impact on me. 

Then, on the 12^th May of this year, I received an email placing my role at risk of redundancy. I’m still not sure what the pool I have been placed in actually looks like, as the numbers on my letter and the University documents do not match. As with many others placed at risk, this has had a significant impact on my self-worth, sense of security and stability, and my initial sense of pride at working for the University of Nottingham has rapidly waned. It has been incredibly difficult to continue to function, turn up to work, and provide the kind of experience, support and presence of mind that I want to give my students. 

Most recently, on the 10^th June, I received an email from the University letting me know that my data had potentially been accessed by cybercriminals the previous day. I am currently enrolled at the University as a student, as well as a staff member, which is why my data was included in the breach. The email informed us that cybercriminals had potentially accessed our contact information, University details, financial information, and personal information. For me, this includes private medical information. The advice provided was to change our passwords and monitor our accounts for suspicious activity. When I attempted to call IT Services to change my passwords (which students cannot do independently) it was not possible to get through. 

This data breach has been even more worrying for me due to security risks in my personal life, with my address needing to be kept confidential. 

Last year I thought I’d secured my dream job, but so far it has felt like one crisis after another. Looking forward to the coming year, I feel more dread than optimism.  

An indebted thank you to, and solidarity with, colleagues from across the University who are currently participating in industrial action at great personal cost. And to those who are not currently out on strike, a reminder to say no to and to continue to resist requests that undermine the action of colleagues who have withdrawn their labour to save our University! 

      On behalf of the Branch Committee

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 13^th 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.

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 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!