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Pooling in the Academic Landscape

Hi

Keen to hear from anyone on their experience and approaches taken when establishing pools for redundancy within lecturing/teaching roles?

Specifically keen to hear from anyone who has had to pick apart historical job titles, inconsistently applied with some stating Lecturer of [SUBJECT] and others not, and then informal or temporary arrangements of Lecturers servicing in or out another subject, programme area and/or campus?

Trying to reduce the size of pools where pragmatic to do so, to limit the number that may become at risk, but conscious if we go back to contract base - there are and have been so many historical and layered up applications of employees executing their jobs in practices in line with the fluctuating student enrolment and course/class frequency over the years - it's proving problematic to apply the same principle to all?

Thank you!

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  • The general legal rule is actuality and not contractuality: provided employer has a clear and fair rationale for pooling decisions based on past and envisaged future actual operations that’s usually perfectly okay.
  • Hi, yes, a little experience in that field.

    A vital thing to remember is that university courses tend to adapt to the specialties and expertise of the available academics. So if a history course, for example, has a regular module on the causes of the outbreak of the French Revolution, that's most likely because the course lead did their PhD on that subject. But that doesn't bind the institution to always needing to make sure they have a course lead who has the expertise to teach that subject. If your student numbers are falling and the number of course leads needs to fall from two to three, you would usually make your decision based on conventional criteria such as performance, student feedback, absence rates, length of service etc, rather than on specific areas of expertise. And if the professor with the PhD in mid-18th Century French class dynamics ends up getting the shove, well, that module just gets dropped from the course.

    However, when planning redundancies, you do have to keep in mind the timing of such things. Because if students are already halfway through their French Revolution module and suddenly you make the course lead redundant and kill the module, they have no way to complete their studies or shift to another module and make up for an entire wasted semester.

    This is sometimes managed through long notice periods and counting on the outgoing person being professional enough to stick with completing and marking the module before they leave. But if you are ever left counting on the professionalism of academics, you've screwed up something, somewhere.
  • If you're in a post-92 and apply a workload model/WAM, you may want to consider a pooling model where the initial pool is comprised of those whose workload is X% devoted to teaching and/or research on the course(s) in question (if for example the reason for potential redundancy/reduction is as a result of course closure) And then consult on the pool and refine/expand on the basis of the consultation. If you don't have a workload model/WAM, then see if a similar approach can be taken based on timetables. NB - the creation of the pool should ideally be done/informed by the School/Faculty etc rather than by HR. HR can provide the check and balance to help those defining the pool think about how they would articulate the parameters of the pool, but unless the pool is going to be composed of parameters that only HR would have ready access to draw down data for (e.g all Grade X LEcturers, full time and fractional, within the School of X)- and can articulate the reasons why this pool composition has been chosen, local School/Faculty decisions are probably the starting point. If the reason for redundancy/reduction isn't particular to course closure but rather that a School/Faculty needs to reduce its overall staffing expenditure by X%, and it doesn't matter what grade/level/jobs the reduction comes from, then essentially your pool is the whole of the staff complement of that School/Faculty

    As David mentions, there isn't legislation that specifically defines/mandates how a selection pool for redundancy should be composed, but rather that its composition is reasonable in the circumstances, and that it can be shown that the organisation has genuinely turned its mind to the question of pooling - useful reference case about what 'turning its mind to the question of pooling' means is here (this was a case where the pool was one, but the useful bit is what kind of considerations may come into play when determining a pool): www.stevens-bolton.com/.../how-deep-should-employers-dive-when-choosing-a-selection-pool

    The pool composition, and then the objective selection criteria chosen and applied to determine which staff in the pool are ultimately redundant is pretty much always contentious (as it's frequently seen as a value judgement about individuals) so the best you can do is approach each stage with objectivity and reasonableness at the forefront of how decisions are made. Good luck :-)