Mitigation for teaching lost to strikes leaves students dissatisfied
UCU says it received over a thousand compensation requests as strikes continue.
Classes and assessments have been interrupted this year due to ongoing teaching strikes since last fall. The University and College Union (UCU), one of the staff unions behind the teaching strikes, told Felix that these have caused a “material loss of education for students.” Imperial College says it is currently working with each department to ensure students are supported and learning outcomes are met.
The Joint Trade Unions (JTU), comprising Imperial’s three recognised trade unions, have been on strike since early October as part of a pay dispute with the College, with upcoming strike days on the 16th and 24th of February.
Students and staff alike have expressed concerns about teaching interruptions, which have led to lecture cancellations and rushed rescheduling. According to UCU, over 1,000 student compensation requests have been filed and remain unresolved, while rescheduling has resulted in “coercive pressure” and extra work for staff.
A poll run on this newspaper’s Instagram account found that 66% of respondents reported having experienced cancelled teaching sessions due to ongoing industrial action, while 79% claimed that not all of the content they missed had been rescheduled. The College did not provide Felix with an estimation of the number of teaching hours disrupted by strikes.
“Staff have the right to withdraw their labor,” said Provost Peter Haynes during an open JTU meeting in December. “We respect that, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t do everything that we can to mitigate the impact on our students, and that’s why I am grateful to colleagues who have taken on additional work for the benefit of the students.”
According to the regulatory framework from the Office for Students (OfS), higher education institutions are required to have a student protection plan in place, which ensures mitigation is “fair and reasonable for students,” taking the support they may need into consideration. If mitigation measures fail to preserve teaching continuity, compensation should be awarded to students.
Haynes explained that the College does not currently plan to financially compensate students for teaching interruptions, as “none of the conditions for that have been met.” Financial compensation will only be considered if the College is unable to deliver learning through effective mitigation.
Last summer, the OfS required £2.4 million of financial compensation when learning was not adequately protected following industrial action at Newcastle University. The compensation scheme was funded from staff salaries that went unpaid due to industrial action.
“Our approach will be to carefully monitor every single module that has had some disruption to it, to monitor the impact on the delivery of teaching and assessment, and to ensure that is then made up to them,” said Haynes in the December meeting.
While mitigation is ongoing, Imperial is not considering compensation requests outside of the formal complaints process. After mitigation procedures have concluded, students may raise a formal complaint following the Student Complaints Procedure.
The UCU voiced concerns that the College has not adequately addressed teaching interruptions. A UCU representative told Felix that teaching sessions have sometimes been rescheduled weeks or months after the original date, with the College asking other staff to cover teaching sessions, and claiming that teaching has been “delivered” as soon as a session is timetabled.
“If you treat education as something you can just reschedule on a spreadsheet, you guarantee worse outcomes – and you guarantee the dispute continues,” a staff member told the UCU.
One lecturer was reportedly instructed to deliver a rescheduled teaching session after students had completed all coursework and sat the final exam. No students attended the session. Internally, this session was considered “delivered mitigation,” the UCU told Felix, expressing concerns that students received no educational benefits from a “box-ticking exercise”.
Similarly, in a compensation request, one student commented: “We were told teaching had been rescheduled, but it happened after the exam, so it was pointless.”
The UCU has collected other anecdotes from students sharing how their learning has been interrupted, such as missed teaching from labs being replaced with text resources, or students having to “self-teach” core material from slides without support and to pay for travel and accommodation for sessions that never took place.
“The university says disruption was mitigated, but we didn’t receive anything similar,” one student commented.
Several staff also reported that student-centred recovery plans, comprising consultation with student representatives, “were rejected in favour of rapid fixes that generate a paper trail.”
“This approach is not resolving the dispute,” wrote Tymms. “It is prolonging it.”
At a meeting on January 12th, the University Management Board (UMB) had “wide-ranging discussions” regarding pay and pension. The UMB plans on launching a Benchmarking Working Group and start meetings with the JTU regarding the annual local pay bargaining process in the coming months.
A strike took place on February 12th, to chants of “We know the money’s there! We want our share!” on the picket line. “Collective action is the only way by which we will reach a resolution to this dispute,” Tymms reiterated.
