Language teachers at Northumbria University are in dispute with their employer. The dispute stems from the fact that the teachers are currently entitled to one hour of paid prep time for each hour of teaching and the university wants to reduce that by half. There is a currently a public petition asking university management to reconsider, which we encourage our members to sign. However, as these are fellow language workers, we were lucky enough to directly interview one of the teachers involved.
Tell us a little about the Language Centre at Northumbria University? What role does it fill on campus? How many people work there? Are you all directly employed by the university?
The Northumbria Language Centre (NLC) currently employs 24 lecturers. We mainly teach English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which includes a raft of academic skills. This means most of our UG and PG students are international students, but we also have home students and students, for example from the USA or India, whose first language is also English. We support the students on their degree journey with in-sessional courses. We also teach pre-sessional courses to prepare new or future students for their UG and PG degree programmes. We have a small number of lecturers who teach other languages, such as French, Spanish, and until recently some Asian languages. These course are usually embedded in degree programmes in other faculties. The NLC is an academic unit based in the Department of Student, Library and Academic Services, so not a part of an academic faculty.
Many colleagues share the view that this department/unit has been pushed around too much. In the almost 20 years that I have been here, the structure of the department, its location on campus, and its role in the university has changed more often than I can remember. We used to be a buzzing hub for hundreds of students and dozens of enthusiastic lecturers but we were broken up (some colleagues were put into a different department to teach TESOL students, etc.), renamed and we were put under the control of non-academic managers, who usually do not understand the work we do as academics. On top of the 24 staff, employment varies throughout the academic year. We usually recruit ‘associate lecturers’ on shorter-term contracts to support the teaching during particularly busy times, for example on the pre-sessional summer school, or on programmes that are difficult to staff with permanent staff.
Although we are directly employed by the university, it doesn’t feel that way. When I am on the university website I feel excluded from the initiatives and policies because they don’t apply to me. Until now this division has been subtle but the changes to workload make us visibly, tangibly and economically different, and not just different, unequal. I’d like to add that “Associate Lecturers” are not just brought in for peak times, but often remain on those contracts for 4-5 years. They do the same work for a fraction of the pay (and without the benefits, sick pay, paid leave) and no prospects of promotion. I think that the cut in prep time will result in a cut in pay for these lecturers. There are not many people speaking up for them, I’m afraid.
Give us some background to the dispute. When were these changes announced? Was there a consultation process? When is this change slated to go into effect?
This current dispute is only the latest one in a long chain of confrontations between the NLC and the university. Previous milestones were:
- being restructured, i.e. broken up, into degree and non-degree teaching and different department, with loss of several jobs and downgrading of “senior lecturers” (Grade 7) to “lecturers” (Grade 6) and subsequent permanent cap at this Grade 6;
- being thrown out of the academic faculty and pushed into a ‘service department’ (this meant a loss of reputation as well as being managed by non-academics with no background in our work);
- partial privatisation (the successful International Foundation Programme was outsourced to the private provider QA).
This latest dispute started with the announcement of a “Languages Review” some two years ago. As reviews usually mean bad news for employees, we immediately engaged as a union branch and as a team of concerned staff. Yet, this so-called “review” turned out exactly what we had feared – a complete fait accompli. The consultation part of this review was only there in name, and there is little evidence that any of the staff comments were heard (or understood), and none of the questions asked by us were satisfactorily answered by those conducting the review (What exactly is it you want from us? What is your rationale for change?).
Although the reviewers did extensive work outside the university (visits to and meetings with other universities’ management), there was no meaningful consultation of affected NLC staff. It is still unclear (kept secret) exactly how management arrived at their view that jobs needed to be slashed and teaching preparation time to be reduced to 20 minutes per hour. By their own admission, a reviewer only ‘looked at some eLP [e-Learning Portal] modules, and it looked fair’. This coming from someone with no language-teaching background was hard to swallow. Subsequent negotiation between management and UCU meant that no jobs were lost, and the teaching prep time was only reduced to 30 minutes per teaching hour. A bitter, partial success only.
In a very cowardly manner at the start of last summer when people were about to take their leave so it would go relatively unnoticed, we were threatened with redundancy and the prospect of having to reapply for our current roles (well actually different roles which essentially ask us to do more work for less money) but which are somehow not deemed to amount to a change in our terms and conditions. For a whole year now we have been stuck in a stalemate of uncertainty.
If the changes are implemented, what will be the financial impact? How will it impact your workload?
Although the changes do not directly affect our income, they will have a massive effect on the way we work as academics. An internal survey showed that not a single member of staff was in favour of slashing prep time. This is for two reasons: Firstly, if anything, we need more prep time than many colleagues in the university. This is because we do not only have to prepare the actual substance of the topics of the programmes that our courses are embedded in, we also have think through a lesson plan that covers the complexities that come with linguistically and culturally very diverse student groups.
To give you one example: If the lesson aim is to raise awareness of logical fallacies in published articles on the topic of zoonotic diseases, then the lecturer will have to be aware of the causes/implications/effects of zoonotic diseases (although none of us have a degree in medical science), the philosophical background to ethics and academic argument, and they have to be aware of the cultural diversity of their students. This can be particularly tricky when the student groups contain “spiky profiles”, which means that students are both strong in some skills (for example, speaking) and weak in others (for example, writing).
Anyone who teaches such complex lessons will understand that they simply cannot be planned in 30 minutes. I have personally spent up to 6 hours to prepare certain lessons. And even if you teach the ‘same’ lesson again the following academic year, the composition of the student group will have changed! We always need to think a lesson through properly. Every single time.
The second reason is that we are not in any way different from our colleagues in the academic faculties: although we may not hold degrees in the subject areas we teach, we DO teach them, and in addition, we teach them largely to students from a different language background. That alone justifies MORE prep time, not less. That aside, we discussed this matter in our union branch. Although many staff tend to think that 1 hour is not always sufficient, it works rather well as an average throughout the semester – for everyone across the university. Singling out one small group of academics like this seems rather odd. We have not been given a clear rationale for this.
If we are not given proper prep time, then two bad things could happen: either, the quality of the teaching is reduced, or the tutor does the work anyway, but only gets paid half. It is very likely to be a mix of both for most staff.
I’d like to mention another aspect of the proposed changes which will disadvantage some more than others, including myself. And that is that the NLC will no longer be a research unit, in that research will no longer be supported, because our subject is not required to be underpinned by research?? This is a ridiculous argument for a university, a creator of knowledge that language and language teaching does not evolve and does not require investigation to develop and keep abreast of our subject and pedagogy!
It is a misrepresentation to say that the centre is not research active, I believe that around half of our staff have or are near completion of a doctoral qualification, which in most cases has been supported by the university in terms of fees and time. It is a terrible waste of home-grown talent and a neglect of our career development to impose the new workload model upon us.
Okay, here’s a difficult one. Even a half an hour of paid prep for an hour of teaching is unheard of in private language schools. Most TEFL teachers don’t get any paid prep – or they get some meaningless trivial amount like 15 minutes for 3 hours of teaching. What would you say to someone who asks why they should support a dispute where even the worst-case scenario is so much better than what workers get in the private sector?
One must not compare apples with pears. Firstly, we do not teach TEFL. Personally, I have taught all kinds of English subjects to international students of all kinds of backgrounds. For example, in the 1990s, I taught ESOL to asylum seekers and refugees. True, that has its own complications. However, there is a prescribed national curriculum, and there are huge amounts of materials, guidance, regulations which must be closely followed.
On our modules, however, we also need to liaise with the programme leaders in the faculties to ensure that the modules deliver exactly what is required. Although I do think that even 1 hour is not enough for this work, I also acknowledge that the preparation time for TEFL course is insufficient. Particularly in the field of ESOL, where the aforementioned cultural complexities are huge, better prep times would be very beneficial.
To my mind it’s about inequality. We are not in the private sector, we are employed by the university and they should not behave towards us as though we are a private for-profit centre. We are part of an educational institution, we are lecturers, we teach the same students as our colleagues in the faculties, why should we be treated less favourably? What would our students think to know one of their lecturers is given less prep time than the others? What does this say about the university’s commitment to support international students?
I would say to colleagues that they should support the dispute to stand up for education for all, and oppose the privatisation, corporatisation – and commodification of Higher education. The new workload model may well be a step towards preparing the centre for private sector takeover – QA are already literally on our corridor, using the Northumbria logo, recruiting our admin staff, delivering our programmes, now we fear they may be coming for the whole centre. And it could be applied to the wider Arts and Humanities in future. So let’s stand up to this now.
If you could sit down with management and really try to convey just one thing to them, what would it be?
- You need to acknowledge our incredible skills set and let us continue to do our work the way we are used to. Slashing prep time – and treating us differently than other academics in general – is hugely detrimental to the delivery of our modules. It will result either in lower quality teaching, or in increased stress levels, or both.
- Value your staff, support your staff, retrain your staff, empower your staff – they can achieve great things. But devalue them, disadvantage them for years and they will not be productive.
Beyond signing the petition, what can people do to support?
- Recruit more colleagues to your union! Make your beautiful voices heard!
- Do get in touch via well-established networks. This could be within the union (UCU), or professional bodies, like BALEAP, for example.
- Become an External Examiner and be as constructive and supportive of your colleagues as you can. Externals still wield some power, as the universities need to acknowledge their input and demonstrate that they are acting on them.
- Do anything you can to establish a good working relationship with your employers, but do not give in to bullying, incompetent management, privatisation.
- Stand up for fair, equal education for all.
- Join the union, seek allies, call out injustice.