We've been in contact with UCU Canterbury and here's what they wanted to tell our students.
As you know, the University and College Union have announced plans for further industrial action in early 2023, in the form of strike days in February and March.
You can read more about the strikes on these university pages and what it means for students at Christ Church.
Christ Church Students' Union supports the UCU and its members in taking this industrial action in the progression of their pay claim and improvements in their terms and conditions of employment, as we believe that staff working conditions are student learning conditions. We earnestly hope that a settlement can be reached, through negotiations, that does not impact further on students.
We've been in contact with UCU Canterbury and here's what they wanted to tell our students:
You might think the UCU strike is only about pay. It's not. It is also about conditions, the amount of work that an average lecturer or university worker is required to do in any given week.
- Overwork: At CCCU and elsewhere, staff are overworked. They deliver lectures tired, they mark your papers tired. Staff work an average of 10 hours per week longer than they should, for free. Locally, a part of this has been the introduction of a new workload model for lecturers, in which teaching staff are systematically given insufficient time for lesson preparation and marking. Because we want to do a good job for our students, we put in more hours anyway and end up working substantial amounts of overtime every week.
- Marking: Staff get allocated only 20 minutes to mark a 2,000 word student assessment. We are supposed to give you detailed guidance and feedback and help you improve for next time in all sorts of ways inside that time. It takes between 7 and 10 minutes to simply read 2,000 words, leaving us with only 10 minutes to do the really important bit. Does that sound like enough time?
- Preparation: Staff get given about one hour to prepare a 60min lecture. In universities elsewhere, lecturers are given three or four hours to prepare or update their lectures. When staff are given more time to prepare, students get a better classroom experience, and staff are able to bring more of their research expertise into their classrooms.
- Any Extras: Anything staff do to improve the student experience that is "extra", like planning an event or field trip or just generally organising something fun is not given much clear time in our workloads either.
- Supporting Students: Staff are given very small amounts of time, formally, to support students through personal academic tutoring. We regularly work well beyond these allocations because in order to support students, we must.
- Precarity: Across the UK almost 50% of all academic staff are on insecure contracts. That means the excellent teacher you had this year might be gone next year, they have no job security at all. Folks on these contracts also make poverty wages.
Staff are on strike for all of these reasons and many more besides. It's not just about pay; it is about the quality of your education.
You can read more on these pdf links [Why We Are Striking] [To Our Students].