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