Staffing higher education – the snip is coming

“… As the group estimates that the sector employs 20,873 persons, this amounts to a cut of 10%. How this reduction is to be achieved is far from clear. The narrative of the report doesn’t particularly address questions of over-staffing, but rather suggests that staff in both the institutes of technology and the universities work inefficiently, and in particular that their teaching contact hours could be increased. If we were to agree with this assertion (no particular evidence is cited to support it), it would still be far from clear how that might produce staffing reductions of this order of magnitude …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 17 July]