Thank you to all of our department reps and caseworkers who shared their views on the Academic Workload Principles. 

We sent our response to the chair of the working group on Friday, 6 March, who has confirmed receipt and will be reviewing our submission this week.

What We Are Asking For

Our response covers six areas:

1.⁠ ⁠A binding agreement, not just consultation. We believe the Workload Principles — and any models derived from them — constitute terms and conditions of employment. That means they require joint agreement under our recognition agreement, not merely consultation. We are asking the University to acknowledge this, to replicate the precedent already set in CoSS and CAL (where joint agreement has been achieved), and to establish a Joint Workload Oversight Committee with equal union representation — or to embed workload governance within the existing Joint Negotiating and Consultative Committee (JNCC).

2.⁠ ⁠Making the 1,000-point cap meaningful. The University has committed in principle to a 1,000-point workload cap, which we welcome. But as currently drafted, the commitment is vague and unenforceable. We are asking for a clear definition of what counts as a breach, a permitted tolerance of no more than 10%, and an automatic right to review — with carry-forward credit — for any excess.

3.⁠ ⁠Protected research time. In December, the Head of HR committed to 30–40% protected research time for staff with a research component in their role. That commitment does not appear in the current draft. We are asking for it to be incorporated as a guaranteed minimum, applying to all staff with a research component regardless of contract type.

4.⁠ ⁠The link between REF and workload. The University’s REF Code of Practice commits it to fair, equality-compliant processes for identifying staff with significant responsibility for research. That commitment is hollow if the workload model does not give those staff the protected time they need to produce submissible outputs. We have also set out a preliminary financial analysis showing that QR funding — the research income the University receives based on REF results, currently around £56m per year — could cover the cost of 30% protected research time for REF-eligible staff. This undercuts any suggestion that such protection is unaffordable. We are requesting the data needed to complete this analysis and have asked to work through it together at the April meeting.

5.⁠ ⁠Tariffs and transparency. We are asking for workload tariffs to represent genuine time allocations rather than indicative guidance, and for explicit expectations by contract type to be agreed through a joint process.

6.⁠ ⁠Protections that still need to be secured. Several important issues are not yet adequately addressed in the draft, including: consistent standards across Colleges; clear routes for raising concerns, with named contacts and non-detriment protections; explicit protections for staff on fixed-term and probationary contracts; confirmation that independent research is within scope regardless of strategic alignment; and provision for unanticipated workload changes.

What Happens Next

We will be raising these issues at the April Workload Working Group meeting with the University. If you have questions, concerns, or evidence from your own experience that you would like us to bring to that discussion, please get in touch with us.

You can read our full response here.