QMUL’s governing body, the Council, meets on 28 March 2024. They are responsible for the governance and strategy of the university, and for monitoring its implementation by the Senior Executive Team. We wrote to the members of Council to ensure they knew what was going on with the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, and to encourage them to ask urgent questions about the long-term strategies of the university.

27 March 2024

Dear Members of Council,

We hope you are well. We are writing to express serious staff concerns about proposals to restructure the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in the name of Strategy 2030. We have collated information about the proposed changes and their underlying financial arguments. With QM Unison we have outlined to the Senior Executive team how compressed timelines, lack of clear information and the threat posed to jobs are creating extreme pressure and preventing meaningful engagement with the proposals. We are writing now to lay out the risk these proposals pose to the reputation and long-term financial health of QMUL. There is no doubt that UK Higher Education faces problems. What is doubtful is whether short-sighted interventions – shedding staff, shrinking programmes and merging Schools – are solutions to these, rather than catalysts for decline.

HSS has been a pillar of QMUL for years – playing a major role in its entry into the Russell Group – and continues to be so. Schools in the Faculty top research league tables and have garnered renown in the sector. The Faculty is a lean operation, with relatively low staff cost (35% of income compared to the sector average of 51%), low spend per student, and cheap infrastructure costs. HSS has long cross-subsidised other Faculties, as is usual in a university that values the range and breadth of human knowledge. The Faculty generates large surpluses and is projected to generate more cash than in previous years. 

These established, already future-facing structures are put at risk by measures being imposed by the Senior Executive Team (SET). The urgency on which these measures are premised is artificial, given the Faculty is not in the red, and the arts, humanities, and social sciences are not in terminal decline – humanities skills are now more not less crucial; employers value the global standing of Arts & Humanities Education in the UK; Labour is planning to invest in arts in schools. 

In spite of this, SET is pushing measures through at an extremely fast pace: a Voluntary Severance Scheme (VSS) opened a month after the Vice-Principal announced a new ‘Vision’ for the Faculty; it is only open for a month, in the middle of teaching term. Staff taking VSS would have to leave before 31 July, before line managers know what student recruitment in Clearing looks like and thus what student intake will be next year. New programme proposals are expected to be submitted in December 2024. Staff knowledge and expertise should be engaged in a process of this magnitude, but undue time pressure and the underlying threat to livelihoods is preventing this and inhibiting work on alternative strategies. 

There is time for meaningful engagement. SET’s unwillingness to allow for such engagement led to a well-attended QMUCU branch meeting on 24th March, which overwhelmingly voted to call for an indicative ballot on industrial action if reassurances from SET over job security and meaningful consultation are not provided. Staff have asked on numerous occasions for a forum to reflect on the targets set out in Strategy 2030 and to weigh up what is feasible and desirable for the future of QMUL. Perhaps an all-staff meeting with the Council would be a productive starting point?

The restructuring of HSS, pegged to Strategy 2030, is being proposed in order to meet cash generation targets set in 2018, before the pandemic and the worst effects of government immigration policy. Despite asking, staff have not been shown any business case for the VSS or proposed restructure of the Faculty. The only rationale given has been a set of financial projections from Strategy 2030. The £25/30m ‘shortfall’ in 2023/24 (since reduced to £16m due to the hard work and sacrifices of staff) is a shortfall against the target budget set out in Strategy 2030. It is not a deficit. 

One of the key, and most damaging, components of Strategy 2030 are the student recruitment targets set by SET and imposed upon Faculties. The realities of our sector have shifted since those targets were set out, but Faculties, Schools and Departments have not been allowed to adjust them. International student recruitment has dipped across the sector, but SET’s strategies around home student recruitment – which differed substantially from those of nearby competitors such as UCL and KCL – has caused severe and unnecessary harm to QMUL. In August 2022 the Principal imposed higher entry requirements upon HSS Schools, despite objections from those familiar with discipline-specific developments at A-Level and IB. Central admissions and marketing teams now reject candidates before Schools and Departments can make a case for their acceptance. As a consequence, recent years have seen disappointing home student recruitment and in some cases dramatic falls, whereas UCL, KCL and others have adjusted entry requirements downwards and seen higher undergraduate numbers. These tariff changes undermine QMUL’s social mobility commitments and aspiration, as set out in the 2030 Strategy, to be the ‘most inclusive university of its kind’. Our institution has repeatedly shown that A-level grades measure privilege more than potential. Students arriving with lower grades frequently go on to achieve as much as peers with higher grades. This is a metric of social mobility that QMUL has excelled at, and on which much of its reputation relies.

The staff whose work and livelihoods are affected by these recruitment targets and the proposed restructure would like to know their rationale and justification, and for due diligence to be done. They would like to know what studies QMUL has undertaken about the fallout of closures in the sector, and how these might affect our student recruitment. What planning is in place to ensure we have a robust Faculty when secondary school education in the arts recovers? Have required risk and equality assessments been done and factored into contingency planning? What will be the effect of reducing numbers of cheaper HSS students and relying more heavily on those in other Faculties, who are more expensive to teach? Humanities students have cross-subsidised STEM students for years and the government subsidy for students in Band A, B, and C1 does not cover the cost of teaching those; will QMUL be able to afford to teach STEM if HSS shrinks? 

Student recruitment shapes the financial targets set out in Strategy 2030, which aim for year-on-year increases in cash generation. For the past five years, HSS has consistently returned larger surpluses to the central university than the budget target. What has happened to these surpluses? Has the risk to other Faculties of reducing HSS student numbers been assessed? How do Distance Learning and Executive Learning feature in these calculations? What reassurance is there that the proposed changes, given the expectation that Departments return large surpluses to the centre, will not lead to terminal decline? How do we ensure QMUL’s finances facilitate our university’s mission rather than dictate its demise? 

Given Council’s responsibility for the mission and strategic vision of QMUL, we hope you can make time to evaluate how Strategy 2030 is currently being implemented, monitor its effectiveness, and ensure all stakeholders (including staff and students) are meaningfully consulted on how its intentions are met. To this end, we propose a meeting between staff and the Council.   

Your sincerely

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