Precarious work in higher education: a snapshot of insecure contracts and institutional attitudes

The use of insecure and precarious contracts is a much bigger issue than universities admit. When the use of atypical academic staff is factored in, 54 per cent of all academic staff and 49 per cent of all academic teaching staff are on insecure contracts. Staff below the level of senior lecturers and senior research fellow, who do much of the teaching and research in universities, are far more likely to be on fixed-term than open-ended contracts. But problems with the way that [Higher Education Statistics Agency] HESA and universities collect and disclose data mean that it is almost impossible to understand the real scale of precarious work in universities. In January this year, [University and College Union] UCU wrote to every university in the UK asking them to engage with the union in tackling the abuse of casual contracts. Thirty-two universities engaged broadly positively with this initiative; 35 universities chose to ignore it by reproducing a stock letter produced for them by the national employers' body, [University Council for Educational Administration] UCEA; 72 universities failed to respond. The 50 universities with the highest levels of recorded insecurity in their full academic staff and their teaching academic staff are listed here in a series of tables, alongside their response to UCU's invitation.

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