APPENDIX 5
Memorandum from the University College
Lecturers Union (NATFHE)
INTRODUCTION
NATFHE members work in the new—post-92—universities
and colleges of higher education. Whilst science and engineering
course and departmental closures in these institutions often don't
receive the same high-profile media attention as those in more
research-intensive universities, they represent a vital strand
in national teaching and research provision. This submission to
the Science and Technology Committee focuses on the relationship
between teaching and research, the importance of sustaining regional
provision, the negative impact of over-selective research funding,
and the dangers of over-hasty and short-term decision making based
on fluctuations in student choice.
TEACHING AND
RESEARCH
The Committee has invited evidence on the optimal
balance between teaching and research provision in universities—and
in particular the desirability and financial viability of teaching-only
science departments. In NATFHE's view teaching-only departments
are in themselves undesirable. NATFHE was pleased to be represented
on the Government's Higher Education Research Forum (HERF) last
year, under the chairmanship of Sir Graeme Davies. We fully supported
the advice produced by the Forum: "The relationship between
Research and Teaching in Institutions of Higher Education".
This advice clearly states that:
"This suggests that in each academic department
(or within each course team), there needs to be appropriate resources,
a reasonable research culture, and sufficient research activity
(broadly defined) to enable such programmes of study to be designed,
led and taught effectively. It does not imply that every academic
member of staff in every department in every institution of higher
education will have to be entered for the ARE or should be pursuing
Research Council grants."
The HERF advice recognised that the RAE is currently
the only mechanism by which basic funding to support research
in departments is delivered and that, given the highly selective
allocation of research funding via the RAE, departments in some
institutions, (primarily the post-92 institutions), lack the levels
of funding needed to sustain a research culture and research activity.
The HERF solution was to suggest a new funding model that could
support research-informed teaching in institutions with low levels
of QR funding—at a funding level of around £25 million.
Whilst NATFHE, and others represented on the Forum, would not
want to see such a funding model being used to exclude any institution
from seeking funding for research per se, nonetheless, given the
(excessive) level of funding selectivity currently in operation
we saw this proposal as a useful way to help channel some additional
funding where it is most needed.
Ministers accepted the advice but whilst the
funding to the sector announced in December 2004 made some provision
for this, it fell far short of expectations. The £25 million
envisaged as recurrent funding has been delivered as, apparently,
a single allocation spread over three years, with a mere £2.5
million being made available in the first year (£7.5 and
15 million in the two following years). If Ministers accept the
principal that the funding of research-informed teaching must
be addressed then, although any additional money must be welcomed,
it is impossible to see how a single and partial funding allocation
can address the on-going needs of departments to support both
staff and students In engaging with research and research methodologies,
as envisaged by the HERF advice.
Arguably these issues are particularly sharp
in the laboratory-based subject areas where the funding demands
of research and research-informed teaching are highest. Additionally
the fact that opportunities for staff to engage in both teaching
and research will further and further reduce in all but a small
number of leading research universities will, over time, erode
the career motivation of post-graduate and post-doctoral students,
and thus the research workforce.
COURSE CLOSURES
Although it is the closure of whole departments
that hit the headlines, of very significant concern is the reduction
in provision through course closures that may then leave patchy
provision or provision in currently popular areas. For instance
at Anglia Polytechnic University it is now likely that the chemistry
department will either be closed or cut back so that the only
curriculum on offer will be forensic science. Although it is vital
that higher education is responsive to student demand there is
a danger that short-term decisions are made—especially where
subjects are expensive to provide and sustain. Once courses have
been closed and staff have left it is not easy to open up provision
again. Smaller-scale provision in the post-92 institutions is
also likely to be serving different communities of students, employers
and other research-users than the major science research departments—communities
that are as entitled to their share of public funding for science
and engineering as any other.
For instance, at Sheffield Hallam University
a suite of courses in civil engineering, physics and chemistry
was cut in 2002. It was argued that student numbers were insufficient
to justify necessary expenditure on laboratory, staff and support
facilities, that there would be further reductions in undergraduate
applications in the relevant areas and that there was adequate
existing alternative provision at other UK universities. In fact
the forecast of student numbers was contested by staff in relation
to civil engineering—and indeed there has been a significant
rise in UCAS applications for civil engineering in the subsequent
two years, and part-time applications were rising at the time.
And although there was other provision in all three subject areas
in the locality it did not provide the same range of courses as
those on offer at Sheffield Hallam. Indeed it was argued that
the SHU provision could be viewed as complementary to that on
offer at the older, more research-intensive universities—being
more oriented to local and regional industry and often offered
on a part-time and sandwich basis. This not only points up the
dangers of short-termism in closing provision in key subject areas,
but also suggests that the needs of part-time, work-based students,
local employers and the regional economies can all suffer when
strategic planning is over-focused on international research competition
and the need to fund a small number of highly competitive research
departments at the expense of broader and smaller-scale teaching
and applied research.
A similar argument has been made by staff at
Coventry University where the chemistry department has been told
that their numbers will be reduced by half. As yet the union has
not been consulted and the university rationale is unclear. We
would argue that although there is neighbouring chemistry provision
at the university of Warwick, once again the two departments are
working in very different areas, with different students, and
the loss of capacity at Coventry will have an impact that will
not be compensated for by the Warwick provision.
It is also the case that whilst the widening
participation and access debate tends to focus on sub and first
degree level provision, some of those institutions that do most
to increase participation from under-represented groups in higher
education, have the experience of taking students through access
routes and seeing them progress through their first degrees onto
PhD programmes. Reducing research opportunities in all but the
most elite institutions inevitably means reducing access to higher
education at all levels.
THE IMPACT
OF SELECTIVE
FUNDING
It is also feared that course closures and departmental
reductions are but the preliminaries to the closure of whole departments.
There is a critical mass of staffing below which RAE aspirations
have to be abandoned, and along with them, hopes for research
funding and academic career progression. The recent announcement
that the Research Councils will fund 80% of research costs in
future is very welcome, and arguably will assist departments in
gaining research council funding despite lower levels of QR funding.
But in practice success in the RAE makes a hugely significant
difference to likely success in gaining Research Council funding.
Inexorably: "to they that have shall be given". And
of course this pattern has now been intensified by the decision
only to fund post-graduate research degree programmes in departments
that received a rating of at least 4 in the last RAE (or 3 in
those units receiving research capability funding). Once a negative
trend has been established in terms of the RAE ladder having been
pulled up, and staff begin to leave, it becomes harder and harder
to attract students. The viability of whole departments is under
threat. The same occurs where redundancy and partial closures
take effect. At the University of Greenwich the School of Chemical
and Life Sciences has lost about half of its lecturers over the
last eight years, with a similar pattern in Engineering. Further
cuts are now likely and staff take the view that the School is
now getting close to the limit at which course provision can be
sustained.
It is also worth noting that the inextricably
entwined funding pressures of inadequate research funding and
difficulties in student recruitment may have hit the post-92 institutions
rather earlier that the better funded pre-92 universities. At
Wolverhampton University, for instance, the Physics department
was closed 10 years ago, the Chemistry department five years ago,
and the School of Engineering has cut manufacturing engineering,
materials and quality awards.
FUTURE STUDENTS
Any enquiry into strategic science provision
also needs to look at the health of teacher education in both
primary and secondary science—at University College Chichester,
for instance, the Primary ITT science course closed three years
ago, although there are now attempts to re-start it. Student demand
for science and engineering at higher education will not improve
unless science teaching and the science curriculum at primary
and secondary level is sufficiently exciting and effective. Another
critical issue in relation to the arguments for sustaining provision
not only on a geographical basis, but in terms of institutional
type and range of provision (that is, industry and local economy
focused science and engineering) is the need for universities
and colleges to work with local schools, colleges and employers
to help stimulate interest in the sciences in the school-age students,
and those who might come in through work-based and work-related
routes.
Many of the post-92 HE institutions are well-placed
in terms of existing partnerships to work to stimulate student
demand for new curricula and modes of study in science and engineering—and
at the same time to address government targets in terms of widening
participation. But they need the funding to deliver it, and that
includes research and teaching funding mechanisms that underpin
research, and research informed teaching, in all higher education
departments.
January 2005
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